The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

looking” peasant consciousness. He had emerged as a leader of the fight against
rehabilitation by a social movement that simultaneously seized ‘traditional’ institutions of
chiefship and appropriated institutional forms of the state, as well as the political symbols
of secular nationalism, giving rise to a “polymorphous polity” that had acquired popular
legitimacy. His was a subaltern politics that wanted the moral reconstruction of chiefship,
rather than its destruction and that sought the cathartic healing of society rather than the
“seizure of power”. 232 Nlabati could not simply be typecast as heroic resister.
Crais’ framework for political history sought to understand resistance lives in terms of
“the intertwined histories of state formation and popular culture”. Here, the state and its
effects were “translated into indigenous concepts”. Crais tried to draw attention away
from “secular vision[s]” of the state and society, whose “conception of social reality” had
been “borrowed from the West”. 233 Secular nationalism was driven by “liberal modernist
sensibilities”, which were framed in terms of a “register of radical individualism”. African
political elites “scarcely understood” the sentiments and conceptions of subaltern
nationalism, which had “perplexed and troubled” them, and which they had “disdained
and dismissed”. Nevertheless, it was this “prophetic nationalism”, which “intersected
with, and substantially radicalised, more conventional elite‐based formations such as the
ANC and the ICU”. 234 Subaltern social movements, according to Crais, engaged with
formal nationalist political organisations from a relatively autonomous position, based on
indigenous concepts.
Crais’ argument for a culturalist analysis of the political took the form of a shift away from
modernist, secular institutions and conceptions of resistance in search of resistance in an
indigenous idiom. Secular nationalism, by implication, was left to the attentions of
documentary and social historians. Crais failed to address how histories of secular
modernist politics could be reconceptualised in cultural terms beyond the framings of
documentary and social history. This is a lacuna that this dissertation seeks to address, by
232 Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil, pp 180‐193.
233 Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil, pp 137, 144, 229.
234 Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil, p 144.
189