The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

deepening in Robben Island’s cultural economy, it seemed as if the demands of tourism
and the pilgrimage to Cell No. 5 in B Section had temporarily won out.
In South Africa at the turn of the millenium a biographic character was being given to the
cultural landscape, with the life of leaders a central focus. Biography, conceived of in quite
conventional ways, was confirmed as one of the chief modes of negotiating the past in the
public domain, and was a central feature of stories of resistance and reconciliation,
recovered as the basis of nation‐building in the new South Africa. At the centre of all of
this biographic activity, and reflected through a cluster of biographic projects, was the life
of Nelson Mandela, whose ‘long walk’ came to symbolise the new nation’s past. The
Mandela Museum, the Mandela Library and Awaiting Trial Block on Constitution Hill in
Gauteng ‐ itself a Legacy Project ‐ joined the Robben Island Museum (with Cell No. 5, B
Section and the Mandela Gateway) in constituting a phalanx of public history projects at
the apex of South Africa’s heritage landscape. To this was added the legacy project on ‘the
Mandela Trail’, which was given flesh through the publication of Luli Callinicos’ book on
the heritage site landscape of Mandela’s biography. 232 Together these heritage initiatives
and mediations tried to ensure that Mandela’s ‘walk to freedom’ would remain the key
trope for the nation’s history narrated as the triumph of reconciliation.
These heritage depictions of Mandela’s biography need to be understood as following on
a longer genealogy of biographical work in which Mandela’s narrated life came to be
inscribed into South Africa’s process of nation making as embodying its heritage and
ensuring its prospects. These are more than just questions about image and myth. They
are questions about the cultural production of Mandela’s life through the medium of
biography, which involved different kinds of biographical activity, different stages of the
biographical process and particular circumstances within which biographical activity
occurred. These are also questions about the ‘relations of cultural production’ involved
and the intervention of experts and assistants, promoters, publicists and image‐makers in
biographical processes through which Mandela’s life has been produced over time.
232 Luli Callinicos, The World that Made Mandela – A Heritage Trail.
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