The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

The reading of documents is not proof against false
conclusions – but the historian must at least have these
available before a coherent account can be written. More than
this, there must be some insight into the period in the
country’s history, the members and their actions. In the
absence of such evidence and insights, what is written can
only misinform. 33
While some of Hirson’s work took place on the edge of and partly in relation to the
academy, the main corpus of his intellectual endeavours occurred outside, as part of
his work as a socialist intellectual, connected with the socialist movement, who
wanted to place certain understandings of the history of socialism in the public
domain. The journal, Searchlight South Africa, which he edited between 1988 and 1995,
sought to offer “analyses from a critical Marxist standpoint” and to provide a platform
for critical debates on South African history and politics. 34 In addition, Hirson
produced his own historical research on South African labour history and political
history, which gave rise to a few monographs. 35 A substantial amount of this research
and writing took a biographical form, 36 and, while Hirson was critical of any
“beatification” of individuals, 37 this was biography as chronological narrative, geared
towards the discovery of origins and causation, and based upon the extensive,
international search for written sources ‐ however scant ‐ of evidence of political
thought and policy. And the purpose of these studies of socialist lives was evaluative,
1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), in Revolutionary
History, Vol 4, No 4, Spring, 1993, pp 173‐174.
33 Baruch Hirson, Review of Robert J Alexander, International Trotskyism 1929‐1985, p 174.
34 Preamble to Searchlight South Africa, No 1, September 1988, p i.
35 Apart from Yours for the Union, Hirson had published a Marxist analysis of the 1976 uprisings in 1979
(Year of Fire, Year of Ash: Soweto, Roots of a Revolution? London: Zed, 1979) and an account of the 1925
Seaman’s Strike (with Lorraine Vivian, Strike Across the Empire: The Seamen’s Strike of 1925 (London:
Clio Publications, 1992).
36 Baruch Hirson and Gwyn A Williams, The Delegate for Africa: David Ivon Jones 1883‐1924 (London:
Core Publications, 1995); Baruch Hirson, The Cape Town Intellectuals: Ruth Schechter and Her Circle, 1907‐
1934. Here, we can also include Hirson’s autobiography, a testimony of an unconventional socialist
life, which also sought to reinterpret aspects of political and labour history. See Baruch Hirson,
Revolutions in my Life (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995).
37 Baruch Hirson, ‘South Africa – The State of a Nation’, Searchlight South Africa, No 12, June 1995, p 27.
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