The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

together, these booklets attempted to show how leaders in southern Africa had “struggled
for freedom and justice”. They sought to recover the “important roles” of leaders, who
had been “largely ignored by the history books”. Educational activities appended to the
end of the booklets sought to test learners’ grasp of chronology and causation in
appreciating each life history, as well as their memory of the ‘biographic facts’ presented. 36
The tendency in these biographical offerings was for narratives of political events to be
constructed through a clear story line with emphasis placed on the deeds and decisions of
leaders. Historical explanation was couched in terms of individual character and
intention, and history in the form of chronological narratives of individual ‘great lives’
was presented as furnishing lessons of the past. Almost without exception, the individuals
portrayed in the series were leading representatives of resistance paths associated with the
ANC. Individually and collectively, the booklets focused on the construction of a national
identity, stressing the ‘non‐racialism’ of their subjects and their capacities to transcend
racial and ethnic divisions and identities. Biography in the form of the lives, speeches and
opinions of leaders formed the basis of histories of resistance and political organisations.
Indeed, the individuals constructed in these resistance biographies were reduced to
“hangers on which to peg ... repetitive histories of struggle”. 37 In similar vein, the
Mayibuye Centre was a co‐publisher of portable pocketbooks called ‘The Essential Series’,
which sought to “[capture] the essence of South African people, places and things” mainly
for tourists. Once again, political biography was a key element in these lessons of political
36 This series produced by educational publishers Maskew Miller Longman under the general
editorship of John Pampallis grew rapidly between 1992 and 1995, and featured a list of ‘Great
Women’ as well, such as Tamana, Joseph, Lilian Ngoyi, Ruth First and Cissie Gool. Pampallis had
been the author of the history textbook, Foundations of the New South Africa (Cape Town: Maskew
Miller Longman, 1991), which in hagiographic fashion, presented South African history as a long
march to a triumphant ANC‐oriented non‐racialism. Pampallis had used an earlier version of this text,
National Struggle, Class Struggle, in history classes at Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania.
See my critical discussion of this text, ‘Foundations of a New Mythology’, South African Historical
Journal, No 26, May 1992.
37 Nicky Rousseau, ‘A Curious Flattening of History’, Democracy in Action, Vol 8 No 6, 15 October 1994,
pp 28‐29.
204