The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

individuals and lives to take account of identity performances, the inherent instability of
subjects, and the place of narrative in the production of lives.
From the late 1990s and in early 2000s, these possibilities of transcending social history’s
conventional framings were taken a step further in the biographical research of Stephen
Clingman and in the methodological challenges posed by Clifton Crais for the study of
South African political history. 197 From the late 1990s, the lines between the academic
and the pubic arenas began to be blurred. This boundary crossing took a number of
forms. Certain academic publications, such as Clingman’s study of Bram Fischer’s life,
began to shake off scholarly conventions in order to reach larger audiences in the public
domain. Also, memorial biographical tributes to national political leaders sought to
emulate the form of the academic monograph, and to engage with academic settings of
production, in spite of scholarly insufficiencies. 198
Nevertheless, at this time, some heritage institutions, such as the District Six Museum,
began to claim an independent location as a space of public scholarship, where complex,
theoretically informed studies of life histories in Cape Town’s past began to be
generated in exhibitions and publications. This was part of a fundamental shift that had
begun to occur in South Africa in the mid‐to‐late 1990s, in which the academy had
197 Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998); Clifton
Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
198 Elinor Sisulu’s study of the political lives and relationship of the Sisulus, Walter & Albertina Sisulu:
In Our Lifetime (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002) is an interesting example of this phenomenon. Here,
the designation of Elinor Sisulu, the Sisulu’s daughter‐in‐law as author belied a more complex form of
authorship that gave rise to this book. Complex authorship tends to be characteristic of many
biographies produced in the public domain. In Sisulu’s case, this authorship included having a
principal editor as well as consulting editors. Sisulu had graduate academic training, and had
fellowships at Harvard and UCT, and gave a lecture at Wits University, as part of the production of
this study. Yet, the theoretical and methodological scope of this study was quite limited, in spite of her
direct and almost unlimited access to the Sisulus, and the laudable intention to produce a biographical
study that examined the personal and political. In the end, the main value of this book lay in its
documentation of political lives of “legendary South African leaders” (), in a story of “patience, hope, enduring love and ultimate
triumph”, and to a lesser extent, in its examination of how an “all‐embracing sense of family” had
informed politics (p 14).
177