The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

genealogy of biographic mediation was bequeathed to the Mayibuye Centre in the early
1990s and was in turn inherited by the Robben Island Museum.
Chapter Four ends by analysing the rise of foundations such as the Nelson Mandela
Foundation as institutions both of legacy management and biographical production. It
argues that the preservation of Mandela’s memory required ongoing critical biographic
work, not its imposition through public landmarks and not a concentration on image
management and brand awareness. As with the entry of biography into the realm of
memory in other parts of the world, in South Africa the most challenging
methodological approaches which have transcended frames of documentary realism
and triumphant celebration have been in museum exhibitions. At both the Hector
Pieterson Museum in Gauteng and at the District Six Museum in Cape Town, attention
was paid to issues of knowledge production and mediation in the work of biographic
representation in ways that saw biography marshalled in the process of developing a
critical citizenship.
The focus on the production and contestation of I.B. Tabata’s biography in Part Two
begins with a survey of sites and institutions in Cape Town and the Eastern Cape where
his life was marked, commemorated or narrated. It also examines the limitations of
approaches to Tabata’s life and politics in the documentary histories that have focused
on the Unity Movement, especially in the work of Allison Drew, Baruch Hirson and
Robin Kayser. These shortcomings arose from a methodological preoccupation with
documents as seemingly transparent windows upon political policies and with
uncovering real lives of political leadership. In the cases of both Drew and Hirson, their
projects of empirical recovery were connected to political evaluations of the social
analyses and political strategies of socialist activists, in order to draw lessons from the
storehouse of the past. Robin Kayser mined the Tabata Collection as merely a repository
of facts of resistance, to enable records to be set straight. In the process, he overlooked
prior processes of narration and authorship, and indeed the mediated nature and storied
character of the Tabata archive. The challenge remained of how it might be possible to
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