The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

state they contested”, as the colonised sought “to penetrate the hidden abode of colonial
power and to create a space within which to critique the authoritarian state”. This was a
history of hybrid political forms and of appropriation and mimicry, of the intertwining of
power and resistance, which sought to go beyond the convention of “how the thrust of the
colonial state was met with the riposte of the oppressed”. Crais hoped that this approach
would complicate and revitalise older conceptions of history ‘from above’ as well as
history ‘from below’. 230
While biography was not an overly apparent feature of Crais’ research, this altered
framework incorporated concepts of personhood and resistance lives. Crais was interested
in those “who did not occupy the more fortunate positions within colonial society”, and
those “who did not lead but who sometimes participated in organised oppositional
politics or formed local social movements of their own that contested the state and its
functionaries”. Crais defined these people ‐ “the poor who were hounded as they
struggled to make ends meet”, and who “hovered on the edge of landlessness and
poverty” ‐ as the “subaltern”. 231 Their biographies were not simply those of ‘sturdy’
resisters at the local (and supra‐local) level, whose life trajectories, as rational subjects,
could be understood in terms of a Cartesian incremental modernity.
Instead, leaders of local social movements, such as Ntlabati Kwalukwalu of Mount Ayliff,
evinced a hybrid and seemingly contradictory political consciousness, whose character
was rooted in indigenous grammars. In addition, their ideas and practices were
understood beyond a bifurcated notion of domination and resistance. Ntlabati, who had
been stripped of his position of headman in the 1930s, led resistance by the Congo to stock
culling and rehabilitation in Mount Ayliff in 1947, and yet continued to lay claim to
chiefship. Ntlabati’s political trajectory, however, was not a reflection of some “backward‐
230 Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil, pp 137, 144, 229. Strangely, at no stage has Crais discussed the
methodological and theoretical implications of his use of evidence led under the coercive
circumstances of criminal trials for understanding ‘subaltern’ consciousness. In addition, questions
need to be asked about how one can think about the notion of evil more historically and analytically,
as a means of historicizing indigenous categories.
231 Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil, p 11.
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