The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

It is this biographic impetus which entered the domain of public culture in the 1990s. No
longer were the objectives those of solidarity propaganda and political mobilisation.
Instead, these were supplanted by the purposes of nation‐building and the insertion of
biography into a discourse of recovery of hidden heritage and biography as lesson. The
Mayibuye Centre republished Brian Bunting’s biography of Moses Kotane in a new
edition as a biographic lesson of an exemplary life. A new edition of Island in Chains was
released, which incorporated 28 extra pages on his political life after his release from the
Island culminating in the 1994 ANC electoral victory and his swearing in as a Senator.
This time it was identified as “Indres Naidoo’s book” and took its place on the shelves of
bookshops among autobiographies of resistance, triumph and reconciliation. In a new
introduction, Naidoo gave the book’s extended narrative a motto: “From Robben Island to
Exile to Parliament”. 65 Any sense that Albie Sachs had written the book from Naidoo’s
narrations, and that it had been the product of collaborative labour in the work of
exposing apartheid’s conditions, was obscured.
It was this changed biographic impetus that also found expression in a transforming
MuseumAfrica in the 1990s, as part of its ongoing attempts to acquire a new institutional
character. Once again, a heritage of resistance was narrated in relation to the achievement
of victory within a celebratory nationalist paradigm. MuseumAfrica was pleased to
acquire the police ‘criminal’ record on Walter Sisulu’s political activities for the Tried For
Treason exhibition. The dossier contained details on Sisulu’s arrests and convictions for
political offences between 1952 and 1964. These ranged from his arrest for failing to
produce a pass book in the early 1950s to his sentence in 1963 to six years’ imprisonment
for membership of a banned organisation. It also contained details of Sisulu’s conviction in
1964 at the Rivonia Trial and his sentence to life imprisonment on Robben Island.
Significantly, the file also contained the warrant for Sisulu’s release issued by the Prison’s
65 Mac Maharaj, ‘Foreword’ to Indres Naidoo (Prisoner 885/63), Island in Chains: Ten Years on Robben
Island (Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2003 (first released in 2002). Note the new designation of the
book’s authorship.
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