The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

the centre of South African history as well as informal citizenship training for
schoolchildren.
Resistance biography was a feature of the organisation and development of the Mayibuye
Centre’s archive as well. This took the form of collections of personal papers of activists,
consisting of correspondence, manuscripts, documents and other materials that were
compiled, ordered and catalogued. More than simply objective documentary records,
these collections could be seen as forms of biography that contained narratives of
resistance lives and reflected different stages of intervention and strategies of
production. 33 It may be the case that the Mayibuye Centre was no different from other
archives more generally, in which collections based on personal papers were a time‐
hallowed orthodoxy. Indeed, it is interesting to note the extent to which biography may lie
at the heart of the archive in general. 34 After embarking on projects to turn resistance
archives into digital products, the Mayibuye Centre also planned to take their collections
in political biography into the multimedia realm. 35
In the early to mid‐1990s, the South African reading public, especially young schoolgoers,
were also served with a popular history series based largely on political biography.
Presented as a historical recovery and restoration initiative, booklets in the series entitled
They Fought for Freedom focussed on Sol Plaatje, Z.K. Matthews, Yusuf Dadoo, Mohandas
Gandhi, Oliver Tambo, Helen Joseph, Steve Biko, Dora Tamana and Chris Hani among
others. More than twenty publications were planned in this series. Individually and taken
33 See, for example, ‘Ahmed Kathrada Collection’, Compiled by Kier Schuringa (Mayibuye Centre
Catalogues No 9, 1995) and ‘Dr Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo Personal Papers’, Compiled by Peter Limb
(Mayibuye Centre Catalogues No 15, 1995).
34 Although some attention is given to presence of autobiographical texts in archives, this conceptual
issue of the organisation of archives is surprisingly not a focus of analysis in Carolyn Hamilton et al
(eds), Refiguring the Archive.
35 See the monumental CD‐ROM series, Apartheid and the History of the Struggle for Freedom in South
Africa. This CD‐ROM publication was available either as a “Concise History”, with material selected
especially as a “Home Edition”, or as a “Comprehensive History” formatted either as an “Academic
Edition” or “Library Edition”. (‘Quick Facts: Apartheid and the History of the Struggle for Freedom in South
Africa’, Mayibuye CD‐ROM Publications, October 1995 [Pamphlet]). In 1996, the Mayibuye Centre was
also planning a CD‐ROM production on the life of Walter Sisulu, incorporating animation and hours
of recorded oral history.
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