The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

element of its main project, SADET also gave support to Elinor Sisulu as she was
preparing her manuscript on the Sisulus. 203 The HSRC, in turn, gave support to SADET
by seconding a senior researcher to “help provide strategic research leadership to the
national project”. 204
In the late 1990s, as life history research was emerging as a key feature of studies of
South African resistance history in the interstitial spaces between the academy and the
public domain, David Philip publishers brought out Stephen Clingman’s long‐awaited
study of Bram Fischer’s life. In spite of being a tome of 500 pages, the publishing
intention was to reach a wider ‐ even if serious ‐ readership beyond the academy. With
the book uncluttered by the academic convention of footnotes, the publishers promised
an “extraordinary story” of a “pioneering anti‐apartheid leader”. 205 In spite of its
seeming popular character, Clingman’s study was indeed one of the most theoretically
informed and methodologically engaging examinations of a South African life of
resistance politics, which began to transcend the heroic narrative framings of the
emerging struggle biography genre. 206 It drew upon theoretical formulations he first put
forward in a conference paper in the late 1980s. 207 Nevertheless, as we shall see, the
oral histories of actors in the liberation struggle”. Five volumes were planned: on the 1960s, on the
1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the negotiated settlement, and would incorporate a focus on biographical
profiles (Thabo Mbeki, ‘Address at the Launch of the South African Democracy Education Trust’
; South African Democracy Education
Trust, ‘Request for participation in oral history project of SADET’, Circular Letter from Prof Ben
Magubane, Project Leader, n.d.; Sifiso Ndlovu, personal communication).
203 Elinor Sisulu, Walter & Albertina Sisulu, p 9.
204 . It is also interesting to note that HSRC‐based
researcher and biographer, Thembeka Mufamadi, was also seconded to the Nelson Mandela
Foundation. See .
205 ‘Book Information: Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary by Stephen Clingman’ (Flyer, n.d.). The
lack of footnotes may have been explained by the fact that Clingman was a literary scholar and not a
historian. Clingman’s previous book was about Nadine Gordimer’s novels. See Stephen Clingman, The
Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1986). In spite of the lack of
formal footnotes, the book had general notes at the end indicating the sources for each chapter, as well
as a comprehensive and formal bibliography.
206 Ironically one of the co‐publishers of this book was Mayibuye Books, one of the main sources
through which the conventional, masculinist struggle biography proliferated in the 1990s. See Chapter
Four.
207 Stephen Clingman, ‘Biography and Representation: Some Analogies from Fiction’, History
Workshop Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, February 1987. See the discussion of this
paper in Chapter One.
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