The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

“grouped the themes into chapters” and produced a narrative of “an island in chains”, a
“story of resistance” in the first person “as seen through the eyes one who lived through it
all for ten years”. The collaborative aspects of this book’s production went further. The
manuscript had been submitted “to the scrutiny” of other former Island prisoners, and
their “helpful comments” had greatly “enriched the book”. Island in Chains was an
example of collaborative political auto/biography put to work of exposing conditions on
Robben Island, with an eye to having it closed down, with all political prisoners
released. 61
From the 1960s, in the aftermath of the Treason Trial, Sharpeville and Rivonia, lines of
dominance and ascendancy emerged within this biographical lineage, as the terrain of
resistance politics was fundamentally altered and a dominant history of resistance centred
on the ANC was consolidated. As the ANC established its dominance in South African
exile politics, a heroic history of the ANC was created tracing a progressive process of
political development, of growth leading to greater maturity and militancy as lessons of
the past were learnt. The 1950s was viewed as a ‘golden age’ of political achievement on
the part of the Congress movement. By the 1980s inside South Africa, the resurgent
Congress movement in the form of the UDF sought to build a national movement through
replicating the perceived glories of the 1950s. 62 In this construction of tradition, Congress
was seen as embodying an “unbreakable thread” of non‐racialism. 63 In this altered terrain,
biography ‐ as vehicle of political mobilisation ‐ was marshalled in the service of ‘the
struggle’ and the lives of ANC leaders, especially that of Nelson Mandela, became
metaphors for the ‘spirit of resistance’. 64
61 Indres Naidoo and Albie Sachs, Island in Chains: Ten Years on Robben Island by Prisoner 885/63
(Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1982). The references are to the Postscript by Albie Sachs and the
Foreword by Francis Meli, then ANC Director of External Publicity.
62 For an example of this ‘struggle history’ produced inside South Africa in the 1980s, see UWC History
Department/Education Resource and Information Project, Let Us Speak of Freedom, Vols 1‐4, Bellville,
n.d. For an example produced outside, see John Pampallis, Foundations of the New South Africa.
63 Julie Frederickse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non‐Racialism in South Africa, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990.
64 One example of a ‘solidarity history’ of resistance where a central place was given to biographies of
‘heroes of the struggle’ is Heidi Holland, The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress,
London: Grafton Books, 1989. For an extended discussion of biographies of Nelson Mandela, see
below.
211