The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Service in 1989, marking eventual freedom from surveillance and domination by the
state. 66
The police file on Walter Sisulu, however, contained much more than merely a collection
of records documenting his encounters with the apartheid state’s security machinery. It
was also a testament to surveillance of political activists by the state. It was an account of
the continuous presence of policeman, Detective Dirker who was present at almost every
confrontation Sisulu had with the state, either as arresting officer or policeman in charge.
Indeed, more than merely a documentary source on political activity or policing, the
security police dossier can be seen as a species of biography, an instance of repressive
biographical attention to an individual, as a mode of surveillance, regulation and terror. 67
The Tried for Treason exhibition missed out on an opportunity to go beyond the paradigm
of recovery to consider genres of biographic narration, and forms of biographic mediation.
This kind of focus would have enabled MuseumAfrica’s process of institutional
transformation to go further than merely a new empirical focus on black history, to asking
questions about the production of biography as history and the changing conditions and
relations of its production.
New history museums established in the mid‐1990s also focused on biography and life
history as part of their memory work. The District Six Museum was created in 1994 as a
project that worked with the histories of District Six, the experiences of forced removal,
and with memory and cultural expression as resources for solidarity and restitution. The
focus on the history of District Six and national experiences of forced removals were at the
core of the Museum’s work. But its decisive features were methodological. Since its
inception as a museum of the city of Cape Town, the District Six Museum became an
independent site of engagement, a space of questioning and interrogation of the terms of
66 The Mag, Volume 2, 1996.
67 See Birgitta Svensson, ‘The Power of Biography’, for an excellent discussion of prison life in Sweden
as a training camp, testing how social norms can be imprinted and identity formed as well as the
constitution of specific forms of identities and biographies through criminal policy. She investigates
the ways in which the state constructed biographies of its citizens’ lives through institutions like the
prison. We can extend Svensson’s argument by considering forms of surveillance by functionaries of
the South African state, which gave rise to documentary records as a genre of ‘repressive biography’.
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