The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

While Clingman’s study has posed the most serious methodological challenges for
South African political biography, Clifton Crais has raised fundamental questions about
the field of South African political history and resistance historiography, more generally.
Crais has argued for a wider approach to understanding the domain of politics, a view
that has implications for prevailing approaches to understanding political lives and
biographies. 224 Less concerned with institutions and policies, and the trajectories of “elite
politics”, Crais’ research sought to examine “an intimate history of the emergence and
transformation of power’s exercise and of people’s experience of subjugation”. In trying
to understand how people constructed meaning “in the face of power”, Crais focused
his attention on “the conceptual world of people” that had “remained largely unspoken”
and that had been driven from the archival record. This was a world in which people
understood the exercise of power and authority as expressions of evil and the occult,
giving rise to a critique of the state that utilised “indigenous grammars relating to magic
and misfortune”. In this subaltern politics which “unfolded as a form of conversion”,
magic and witchcraft “created the connective cultural tissue linking perception to
action”. 225
In shifting the focus away from nationalism as a secular phenomenon of the African elite
and the literate middle classes, which had been shaped by “liberal modernist
sensibilities”, Crais tried to reconstruct the imaginaries of a subaltern nationalism that
was “not simply derivative”, and that had “little to do with the bourgeois rights of the
individual”. Its roots lay in “indigenous” conceptions of power and authority, in “the
belief that supernatural forces pervaded the world” and in “the ancient conversations”
and was recommended for “those people who are not students of politics, or of history, but are
interested in what goes into the making of remarkable people” (Cape Argus, 17/1/03).
224 See Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil. See also other studies by Crais: ‘Of Men, Magic and the Law:
Popular Justice and the Political Imagination in South Africa’, Journal of Social History, 1998,
‘Introduction’ and ‘Conquest, State Formation, and the Subaltern Imagination in Rural South Africa’,
in Clifton Crais (ed), The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and Political
Imagination (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).
225 Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil, pp 5‐13, 122.
186