The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

A foray into biography in the work of Bill Nasson also reflected a move beyond the
conventional techniques of social history for examining lives through an exploration of
cultural themes in the production of identities. 194 At one level, Nasson was concerned to
trace the life story of Abraham Esau, a carpenter and smith from Namaqualand who had
died in the South African war at the turn of the century. Esau’s life was a story of
“resistance, incarceration and execution” in a war between British imperialism and Boer
republicanism which “turned with abrupt and explosive force into a desperate,
undeclared civil war between rural whites and rural blacks”. 195
For Nasson, however, biography also became a means to address issues of oral
remembrance and storytelling in relation to memory and tradition, myth and legend in
the making of rural and cultural identities. While the war had made Esau a leader, this
did not explain his martyrdom after his death. Instead, the martyrdom of Abraham Esau
offered an integrating element to a bruised, post‐war community and filled a need in
Calvinia for a “symbol of injustice and persecution”. In oral remembrance and story
telling, the presence of Abraham Esau remains structured into “the projection of an
alternative identity” among the inhabitants of Calvinia. 196
In the early 1990s, there were clear indications of greater methodological complexity in
research on life histories, and that it was possible to move beyond the limiting notions of
the stable, coherent individual, as well as the individual as unit of the collective.
Biographical work by Bozzoli and Nkotsoe, La Hausse and Nasson demonstrated
fruitful ways of potentially going beyond documentary and realist approaches to lives
through their examinations of ‘life strategies’, the self‐scripting of lives and the cultural
production of lives through martyrdom, myth and memory. These represented steps in
the direction of fundamentally altering the categories through which we think about
194 See Bill Nasson, Abraham Esauʹs War, Chapter 7; Versions of this chapter have also been published in
other places. See ‘The War of Abraham Esau 1899‐1901: Martyrdom, Myth and Folk Memory in
Calvinia, South Africa’, African Affairs, Vol 87, No 347, April 1988 and ‘Abraham Esau’s War, 1899‐
1901: Martyrdom, Myth, and Folk Memory in Calvinia, South Africa’, in Raphael Samuel and Paul
Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By, London: Routledge, 1990.
195 Bill Nasson, ‘The War of Abraham Esau, 1899‐1901’, pp 239‐40.
196 Bill Nasson, ‘Abraham Esau’s War, 1899‐1901’, pp 118‐125.
176