The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

CHAPTER FOUR
EXEMPLARY LIVES, LONG WALKS AND BEYOND: PUBLIC
HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY AND NATION BUILDING
IN SOUTH AFRICA
During the mid‐1990s, the field of political auto/biography as a mode of negotiating the
South African past experienced a period of growth, even a boom. This escalation in
biographical production and a new focus on the deeds and actions of individuals did not
only take place in the academy. It also occurred in almost all spheres of historical
production in the public terrain. It is possible to see the mid‐1990s as having been a
peculiar ‘biographical moment’ in South African historical studies. The circumstances of
political transition to ‘democracy’ saw the re‐entry into public life on South African soil of
political leaders, many of advanced age, after years in exile or imprisonment. With nation‐
building projected as a new imperative in South Africa after apartheid, the individual and
the biographical life came to take on renewed centrality in the public domain in the mid‐
1990s as histories of resistance were morphed into histories of national reconciliation. The
‘miracle’ of the new South Africa and the demise of apartheid ‐ so this new narrative went
‐ had been made possible by the ‘wisdom’ of heroic leaders, and especially by the ‘special
magic’ of Nelson Mandela.
In the mid‐1990s, this biographic narrative was constructed in almost every sphere of
public culture and through virtually every medium of historical representation. The result
was the celebration and garlanding of leaders in the form of biographies in print and
visual media, aimed at South Africans and the international market through publishing,
television programming and tourism development. Publishers attempted to transform
educational publishing by focusing both on the biographies of great political leaders as
well as life histories of ‘ordinary people’. Television became a key medium for the
proliferation of historical documentaries, which sought to recover histories of resistance
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