The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

As part of these transformations, MuseumAfrica also presented a permanent exhibition in
1996 on the 1956 Treason Trial, inspired by a series of drawings made in court by trialist,
I.O. Horvitch, which it acquired in 1995. 49 Tried for Treason attempted to tell the story of the
Trial through the voices of the trialists, their families, the legal teams, the press, the
photographers and the police. In addition, video interviews and notebooks were used as
“living history” to capture the attention and the memories of museum visitors. 50 A central
place in the exhibition was given to political biography. An entire room was devoted to
biographies of the trialists in the shape of portrait photographs and sketches, and
accompanying biographical information. Significantly, visitors were encouraged to
participate by adding biographical information on pads of blank paper placed underneath
each photograph in the photographic gallery. Tried for Treason was also turned into a
scaled‐down, travelling exhibition so that a resistance legacy could be made available to
schools. MuseumAfrica’s visitors and audiences were told that the Treason Trial had been
“a turning point in the consolidation of apartheid and of resistance to it”. 51
The Treason Trial also represented a key moment in the production of resistance histories
through political biography and of the emergence of popular biography as a tool of
political mobilisation and solidarity against repression. In the late 1950s, the Treason Trial
Defence Fund was a central mediating institution in the production of solidarity
biography. 52 The Treason Trial also generated other cultural representations, such as Alex
La Guma’s vivid descriptions and “court cameos” published in Fighting Talk and New
Age. 53 MuseumAfrica collected Horwitch’s portrait drawings as visual documents of
activists and leaders who had been put on trial in the 1950s, and were inserted into a post‐
49Tried for Treason: An Exhibition on the Treason Trial of 1956‐61, MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg, 1996;
‘Tried for Treason: An Exhibition on the Treason Trial of 1956‐1961, Opening on 27 February 1996’
(Poster, MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg, 1996).
50 ‘Tried for Treason’ (Visitor’s Guide, MuseumAfrica, n.d.).
51 ‘Tried for Treason’ (Visitor’s Guide, MuseumAfrica, n.d.).
52See, for example, South Africa’s Treason Trial, Johannesburg: “Africa!” Publications, 1957. Anthony
Sampson’s book on the Treason Trial, The Treason Cage: The Opposition on Trial in South Africa (London:
Heinemann) was published in 1958 and contained a series of profiles of some of the Treason Trial’s
prominent defendants. It also provided basic biographic data on all the accused in an appendix. Mary
Benson worked in the Treason Trial Defence Fund during 1957 and this experience was crucial in
foregrounding her research on South African resistance history which granted a special place to
biography. See the discussion below.
53 These were brought together in André Odendaal and Roger Field (eds), Liberation Chabalala.
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