The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

constructions of national history. In considering all this biographic attention, it is also
important to analyse the relations of cultural production through which biographies were
produced, claimed and asserted and the biographic genealogies that these narrations drew
upon.
Here we also suggest that these public biographic productions have not been without
contest. In significant cases, in national heritage institutions as well as community
museums, the discursive and methodological boundaries of these public histories were
subjected to important challenges. While heritage projects continued to serve up new
discourses of the heroic leader who delivered the new nation from apartheid’s evil, and of
reconciliation, South Africa’s ‘special offering’ to the world, almost every sphere of
heritage production has seen controversy and contestation. These contests have been
fuelled by tensions within and between heritage institutions over the politics of memory,
the imperatives of commerce and tourism, the demands of intellectual property, and
claims on authority and primacy to interpret a biographic legacy. They have also seen the
plots and methods of dominant biographic representations in museums subjected to
significant critique.
This chapter suggests that the domain of heritage and public history requires serious
examination, for it is here that attempts were being made to fashion the categories, images
and stories of the post‐apartheid nation. From the mid‐1990s, it seems that the
responsibility for the ideological work of national‐identity formation, and the task of the
creation of ‘good citizens’, seemingly shifted away from the schools to heritage
institutions and mediums of public culture. Far from us having seen a retreat from history,
the place of the past was redefined in the spaces of public history and heritage
construction. Some academic historians began to rethink the conventions, hierarchies,
routines and spaces of their discipline’s teaching and research procedures. 1 Others long
1 On these matters, see the issues raised by Tim Nuttall and John Wright, ‘Exploring beyond History
with a Capital “H”’, South African and Contemporary History Seminar, University of the Western
Cape, 8 October 1998. See also the arguments about South African history and domains of production
and representation in Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, `Thresholds, Gateways and
Spectacles: Journeying through South African hidden pasts and histories in the last decade of the
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