The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

these ways, the Mayibuye Centre was a key and influential agency of historical production
in South Africa and an “active, shaping force” for the production of memory. 30 It was
central in both the creation and management of historical images and narratives. The
histories produced took shape in different mediums, each seeking to recover hidden pasts
and resistance histories for the new nation. 31 The Mayibuye Centre was not merely a
conduit for the reversal of amnesia. Instead, it was a ‘theatre of memory”, with its own
“patterns of construction and forgetting” through which history was revised and
revisioned. 32
Alongside a heroic narrative, biography particularly of political leaders had an important
place in these histories. Apart from its publications, the Mayibuye Centre also became a
heritage institution to be visited by tourists and pupils in search of biographic history
lessons. During 1996, schoolchildren seeking fresh accounts of the South African past
during visits to the Mayibuye Centre were taken through a portrait gallery of resistance
faces in South African history. Alongside the Freedom Charter, the Treason Trial and
protest marches against the pass laws, pride of place in these history lessons was given to
the individual resistance leader. With questions such as: “He was one of the founder
members of the ANC Youth League and was imprisoned for 26 years on Robben Island.
Who was he?” and “Which Rivonia trialist was imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson
Mandela and is now a member of the Senate?”, the lives of political leaders were placed at
30 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), p x.
31 A cursory glance at the early publications of Mayibuye Books shows the extent to which popular
political auto/biography featured in its efforts to recover a lost heritage. This took different forms,
ranging from the edited collection accompanied by a biographical introduction, the edited
‘autobiography’ or ‘memoirs’ of political activists or those close to them, and the re‐edited biography.
See, for example, Zubeida Jaffer, The Story of Bibi Dawood of Worcester (1991); Sadie Foreman and Andre
Odendaal (eds), A Trumpet from the Housetops: The Selected Writings of Lionel Forman (1992); Phyllis
Ntantala, A Life’s Mosaic (1992); André Odendaal and Roger Field (eds), Liberation Chabalala: The World
of Alex La Guma (1993); Edward Roux, S.P. Bunting: A Political Biography (Introduced and Edited by
Brian Bunting with a Foreword by Chris Hani, New Edition, 1993); Frieda Bokwe Matthews,
Remembrances (1995); Natoo Babenia as told to Iain Edwards, Memoirs of a Saboteur (1995); Archie
Sibeko (Zola Zembe) with Joyce Leeson, Freedom in Our Lifetime (1996); Eddie Daniels, There and Back:
Robben Island 1964‐1978 (1998). The efforts of academics were also apparent in some of these works.
Mayibuye Books produced more ‘scholarly’ works of a biographical nature in association with other
publishers. See Chapter Three for an extended examination of these.
32 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, p x.
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