The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

and reconciliation in South Africa. One of the central elements in this visual history was a
focus on the narrated lives of political leaders, who were seen as having contributed to the
demise of apartheid and the reconstruction of society. Related to this, the deaths of
liberation movement leaders also led to intense public biographic engagement through the
narration, evaluation and contestation over the meanings of their lives. One of the key
settings for these debates and disputes was the spectacle of the mass public funeral, a
number of which occurred live on television.
In the mid‐1990s, apartheid’s museums and heritage institutions embarked on initiatives
to create an impression of change and renovation. In addition, new museums and projects
began to emerge as part as part of the transformation of heritage. A significant amount of
the heritage work of these bodies involved a concentration on political biography and life
history, as the recovery methods of resistance history and social history seeped into the
domain of public history. From the late 1990s, the creation of new national museums such
as the Robben Island Museum and the Nelson Mandela Museum saw the more purposeful
entry of conventional political biography into the domain of national heritage. The belated
democratisation of heritage resources management involved a renewed search for sites of
significance associated with black lives and resistance pasts, especially those of political
leaders. These in turn formed the basis of new heritage trails and tourist routes. The
process of heritage transformation also saw direct intervention by government through a
parallel programme of Legacy Projects, a key feature of which was political biography as
lessons of history. At the centre of all this biographic activity has been the life of Nelson
Mandela, whose ‘long walk’ came to symbolise the new nation’s past.
This chapter explores the features of this biographic approach that found expression
beyond the academy in South Africa from the mid‐1990s. It examines how modes of
biographic narration were incorporated into the rituals of governance, political
transformation and public policy. It argues that an examination of the range of biographic
activity in the domain of public culture, and an understanding of the nature and
conditions of biographic production are crucial to understanding the place of biography
and the notions of the remarkable individual in the stories of resistance recovered as
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