The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

documented as part of a study of popular religion in South Africa. 238 Heather Hughes
attempted to address the absence of a “proper biography” of J.L. Dube by examining a
further element in his range of ambiguities, viz. his membership of the Qadi chiefdom,
while Cissie Gool’s life history and early political development were recovered through a
feminist perspective. 239
In the 1990s and early 2000s, modernist conventions of biography continued to
characterise much research on lives of national and local leaders, as well as studies of
ordinary people, as part of a growing national discourse about overcoming silences in the
historical record, and mounting notions of history as lesson. What occurred in this work,
as with their predecessors, was a ‘double’ or ‘compound modernism’, involving an
encounter between modernist historical methods – of the recovery of lost histories through
constructing an incremental chronological narrative and placing new facts on record –
with modernist imaginaries of political institutions and national or local leaders, or
individuals understood as bearers of pre‐determined group identities. More broadly, this
was the paradigm of the documentary, which sought to ‘fill gaps’ by recording narratives
of resistance lives as verified truth. Indeed, the project of social history was itself driven by
archival and empirical demands, as individuals were assigned to group identity categories
of recovery.
Drawing on a genealogy that went back to Karis and Carter, these studies reflected a
growing interest in political leadership and the lives of resistance leaders as means of
addressing the political field of democracy and the nation in South Africa. In the mid‐
1990s, however, the flagship publication of South African resistance biography was the life
history of Kas Maine by Charles van Onselen. This book may not have focused on the
career of a ‘great man’ or a nationalist leader, but it served to create a symbol of resilience
238 Charles Villa‐Vicencio, The Spirit of Freedom: South African Leaders on Religion and Politics, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996. Pioneer resistance biographer and documentary historian,
Thomas G Karis, wrote the Foreword to this book.
239 Heather Hughes, ‘Doubly Elite: Exploring the Life of John Langalibalele Dube’; Patricia van der
Spuy, ‘Not only “Dr Abdurahman’s younger daughter”: A feminist exploration of early influences on
the political development of Cissie Gool’, Ph.D Dissertation, University of Cape Town, 2002.
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