The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

To this end, the SBF was not unsupportive of the “Afro‐chic” design outfit Stoned Cherrie,
when it placed a colourful image of Biko’s face on to a fashion T‐shirt as a means of
introducing “the image of Biko to the otherwise uninformed youth”. This may have
served to take the cause of “Biko preservation” from the domain of the party ideologue
and to “liberate [him] from the mausoleum”, but it did not stop Black Consciousness
activists from objecting to “the pop idolisation of our legends”. As one public intellectual
wondered how the proceeds of Biko’s face (at R 310, 00 a T‐shirt) might be directed to the
poor, another expressed his support for the “refreshing mobilisation effort” of the design
move, but added his hope for a transition “from the imagery of Biko to the content of his
writings”. Perhaps Stoned Cherrie might have considered selling its T‐shirts “with an
accompanying paperback copy of Biko’s I Write what I Like”. 288
In the first 10 years of South Africa’s democracy, institutions in the public domain became
sites for the production of history in the form of heritage projects, museum displays, new
memorials, and the performance of identity. A central element of these heritage
productions has been biographic, with the construction of heroic memory in many sites.
Many of these constructions occurred ‘from above’ as part of the engineering of a new
nation in accord with new identifiable discursive frameworks and also involved processes
of heritage commercialisation and image branding. While some projects and initiatives
have sought to contest these hegemonic constructions, this chapter argues that the most
significant biographic challenges have come from the work of critical biography in such
museum domains as the District Six Museum and the Hector Pieterson Museum, which
have shown how it is possible to pay attention to issues of knowledge production and
mediation in the work of biographic representation. Biography needs to transcend the
frames of documentary realism and triumphant celebration in order to be effectively
marshalled in the work of developing a critical citizenship.
288 ‘Finding Biko’, in SL, November 2003; Bongani Madondo, ‘Not just a pretty face’, Sunday Times
Lifestyle, 24 August 2003; Nadia Davids, ‘Public art out of our present’, Cape Argus, 26 August 2003.
The public intellectuals cited are playwright, Davids and former AZAPO executive member,
Gomolemo Mokae.
291