The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

those of writers and dancers (Richard Rive, Johaar Mosaval), and those who were seen as
“not as well known” (the Schaffers brothers, Armien Dramat) to create a representation of
“a broader layer of social experience as well as the agency of ex‐residents in the
development of the museum project and the collection”. 79
The scale, placement and arrangement of the enlarged portraits created a presence as
visual biographies that acknowledged the importance of individual lives in District Six.
But their lightness, airiness and movement also suggested a move away from hard
realism, heroic depiction and images as evidence of the truth of lives. This was a medium
that lent itself to posing questions about lives rather than celebrating them. These qualities
had the effect of enabling life histories to be seen in more complex ways than as fixed,
given and uncontested, or as mere illustrations of historical processes and social structure.
These questioning modes of display were found elsewhere in Digging Deeper, as
opportunities were sought to pose questions about how the museum had acquired images
of people, what the history of these images had been and the ways the Museum’s
knowledge of people’s life histories had been preceded by prior mediation. 80 These forms
of representation were part of a desire to ask deeper questions about biography by
opening up issues about production and the mediated, storied nature of lives as well as
how these life stories came to be told. In the District Six Museum, the Digging Deeper
exhibition began to pose challenges for museum transformation in exploring
methodologies for the representation of public pasts that transcended the limited recovery
frames of social history.
The South African Gandhi
The work that most museums embarked on in the name of transformation, nevertheless,
remained bounded within realist frameworks of recovery and documentation. This
79 Tina Smith and Ciraj Rassool, ‘History in photographs at the District Six Museum’, in Ciraj Rassool
and Sandra Prosalendis (eds), Recalling Community in Cape Town ‘A Guide to the District Six Museum
and the Digging Deeper Exhibition’ (District Six Museum Brochure, 2000).
80 See Chapter Five for a description of the display of a 1941 portrait of I.B. Tabata in the District
Six Museum’s Digging Deeper exhibition.
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