The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

government ministers and ANC members, such as, Alfred Nzo, Joe Modise, Govan Mbeki
and Walter Sisulu in the early 2000s. In the setting of the mass sports stadium, crowds
assembled to partake in funeral formalities. The order of events, speeches, tributes, and
solemn cultural offerings constituted elements of the spectacle. The presence of a military
guard ensured the authority of the state. The crowd, gathered as mass audience encircling
the events, as occasional mass choir, and as the assembled nation in mourning completed
an orchestrated public biographic occasion. The passage of the body as part of a funeral
cortege into the stadium at the beginning of the programme and its passage thereafter to
the burial site were part of the final chapter of the biographic narrative.
The post‐apartheid South African state did not adopt the memorial model of the Heroes’
Acre as the burial site for national leaders. Nevertheless, burials of ANC and SACP
leaders in a section of Avalon Cemetery in Soweto have given rise to an undeclared,
informal Heroes’ Acre, seemingly set aside for leaders of a certain status. Govan Mbeki
had rejected this burial form. When he died in 2001, at his insistence, he was “buried
among paupers” in the “dilapidated old cemetery” in Zwide, one of Port Elizabeth’s
“most abject townships”. “Scores” of VIPs ‐ the diplomatic corps, government “elite” and
“new black moguls” ‐ who had come to bid ‘Oom Gov’ farewell and to pay their respects
to his son President Thabo Mbeki, were made “to drive their air‐conditioned cars along a
dirt road past a squatter camp”, through a “tight human avenue of very poor people”. In
spite of the pomp and ceremony of his funeral, Govan Mbeki was laid to rest amid graves
of the poor, marked by “tin notices stuck onto metal staves”. His grave became “a symbol
… of the rareness of [the attainment of] … status”, and of the fact that “so many of his
people do not come anywhere close to sharing it”. In the setting of the Zwide cemetery,
Govan Mbeki’s grave presented “an image of need but also of unflagging spirit in the face
of it”. 152
Similar tensions between humility and ceremony, and private remembrance and public
ritual marked the funeral proceedings for the burial of Walter Sisulu after his death in
152 Mark Gevisser, ‘Unflagging spirit in face of need sums up Oom Gov’s message’, Sunday Independent,
9 September 2001.
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