The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

iographic work of collection, arrangement and editing by Ruth First in the 1965 book. 268
While freedom was an aspiration under conditions of adversity and repression in the
1950s and particularly 1960s, the notion of a ‘walk’ granted hope through perseverance
and commitment. By 1994 and Mandela’s election as President, the meaning of Mandelaʹs
(and the nation’s) walk, as in Long Walk to Freedom, had shifted to one signifying the
ultimate triumph of destiny. In this long walk, Nelson Mandela’s biography became a
trope for the nation’s history, Mandela was narrated as the embodiment of the nation
itself, and his life became the measure of South African biography.
Biographic brands
As I have argued for the importance of focusing on different genres and institutional
forms of mediation in the process of biographic production in the public domain, I have
also alluded to the appearance of intellectual property questions, which have attached
themselves to biographic imaging and representation. I have drawn attention to the
increased awareness of intellectual property rights on the part of documentary
photographers in South Africa, such as Jürgen Schadeberg, as the politics of resistance
gave way to social reconstruction. Indeed, more generally, resistance biography inserted
itself into a world of commerce as the attachment of the names and faces of resistance
leaders to places, facilities and public spaces has come to be thought of increasingly as a
form of branding. Biographic brand management has come to be seen as an important
component of the management of biographic legacies. Alongside the public museum or
heritage site, the first few years of the 21 st Century saw the rise of the foundation as an
institutional medium for the maintenance, management, deployment and negotiation of
268 Nelson Mandela, No Easy Walk To Freedom. The name of the book was a reference to a statement by
Jawaharlal Nehru quoted by Mandela in 1953, while he was banned, in an article about the “uprising
of national consciousness” (p 21) in the early 1950s. Mandela wrote “There is ‘no easy walk to freedom
anywhere and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again
before we reach the mountain tops of our desires’” (p 31). Nehru’s original statement can be found in
an article entitled ‘From Lucknow to Tripoli’, in his The Unity of India: Collected Writings, 1937‐1940,
New York: John Day, 1942, pp 131‐2.
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