The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation has been long in gestation, and as a result the debts I owe to people
on four continents are indeed numerous. The research for this doctoral dissertation
began indirectly in the United States in the late 1980s, where I completed an M.A. at
Northwestern University. There I discovered how significant the bibliographic and
archival knowledge of librarians and bibliographers has been in assisting researchers
in the field of African Studies. The indefatigable Hans Panofsky (Northwestern) and
the late Moore Crossey (Yale) were extremely helpful answering my questions about
the paper trails of I.B. Tabata’s U.S. travels. Hans gave me a room to work in for an
entire year, which also housed the originals of the Carter‐Karis Collection of South
African political materials, and it is with the treasures contained inside these boxes
that I was able to think about the history and political economy of archiving
resistance and the meanings made in resistance archives for the first time. In
addition, the late Dan Britz helped me with materials in exchange for my Afrikaans
translations of his correspondence from South Africa that had sought in him a
forgotten Boer soul in America.
The idea of the dissertation began with a suggestion by Francis Wilson at a dinner
party at his and Lindy’s home at the beginning of the 1990s, and its shape was
further developed by conversations and discussions in Zimbabwe, Britain, the
United States, and South Africa over the succeeding decade. I was an Oppenheimer
Fellow in the Centre of African Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies
in 1991, where I learnt about the politics of culture while conducting interviews
about the culture of politics. I went back to Britain again in 1994‐5, this time to
Cambridge, where, thanks to Patricia Hayes, I got access to a world of libraries,
seminars and conversations that attuned me substantially to issues of cultural history
and lives as productions. I went back to the United States in 1998 as a visiting
lecturer in Southern African history at Yale, and this time was able to conduct more
research, while immersed in the stimulating debates of the Agrarian Studies seminar
and the forums of the Institute of African Studies.
In the US, I have benefited from various forms of assistance over many years. Tom
Karis and George Houser responded to my requests for information. Bob Edgar
obtained research materials for me. Deirdre Levinson Bergson gave me hospitality
and taught me much about the Unity Movement and its activists. I also met with an
ageing Gwendolen Carter shortly before she died, and held discussions about
resistance history with Tom Karis and Gail Gerhart. At Northwestern in the late
1980s, John Rowe, Ivor Wilks, Karen Hansen and Ibrahim Abu Lughod encouraged
me, while Sarah Maza taught me more than I was aware of then.
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