The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

study did not go far enough in the theoretical and methodological questions it posed
about biographical production.
Clingman’s book was a detailed study of the chronological unfolding of Bram Fischer’s
thought, consciousness and feelings, and his gravitation towards socialism, understood
within the context of the trajectories and disjunctures of family history. The study has
been interspersed with an organisational history of the politics of socialism and
nationalism, and how these coincided with or were addressed by events or decisions in
Fischer’s life. Clingman’s account is a no‐holds barred narrative that does not conceal
the difficulties and contradictions of the young Fischer’s initial immersion in
“physiognomic theories” of “racial morality”, and of the simultaneous ‐ though
contradictory ‐ presence in his young adulthood of enlightened relations with black
people as well as ones regulated by master‐servant ties, in an “almost feudal” mix of
“intimacy and inequity”. While this study has tried to reconstruct the minute biographic
details of events, thoughts and deeds, of Fischer’s life spent “in the doubled intensities
of a legal and political career”, Clingman also presented this account in a way that did
not subordinate the personal and intimate to the political and public. Indeed this study
goes beyond all other studies of South African resistance lives in examining the
unfolding of a personal, relationship, and thus transgressing the convention of
separating the supposedly ‘rational’ and ‘affective’. Clingman’s work is a biography of a
political, intimate and sexual relationship between Fischer and Molly Krige, and their
“complex fields of divergence as well as attraction” and also a study of his relationships
with his children. 208
Clingman’s study has tried to analyse the seeming contradictions and ironies constituted
by the apparent disjunctures between Fischer’s family history and prospects on the one
hand, and his politics on the other. Fischer’s background was that of an elite Free State
family and Boer struggles against British colonialism. His grandfather, Abraham, had
opposed both Plaatje and Gandhi. His education as a Rhodes scholar had given him a
208 Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer, pp 47, 103, 171, 379.
180