The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

opportunities that presented themselves for a methodological overhaul of political
history were largely ignored in favour of more limited documentary objectives. An
argument inspired by Clifton Crais’ approach to Eastern Cape political history would
suggest that Kayser’s focus should have been on rural social movements on their own
indigenous terms – of healing, social health and a confontation with evil, and with
attention to their own political rituals of appropriation – and not merely as passive
recipients of the influence of a modernist ‘elite national(ist)’, political formation. 69
However, for us, the question that Kayser and Adhikari’s work leaves unanswered, is
how it might be possible to approach the study of modernist political formations in
ways that transcend the equally modernist historical methods of institutional and
social history.
The potential for this methodologically fresh line of enquiry was present in some of
Kayser’s research. He did, for example, identify rather interesting ritualised elements
of rural political mobilisation and gathering in Lusikisiki‐Flagstaff and Bizana, where
branch meetings of APDUSA in the 1960s had been held at night in secrecy, with
members carrying bibles as if going to church. Meetings could instantly be converted
into church gatherings if the police arrived. The Lusikisiki‐Flagstaff APDUSA branch
was referred to as ‘Incwadi e Phantsikwellitye’ (‘the book under the stone’) as a reference
to the secrecy with which it was forced to operate. Such interesting issues for a study
of the culture of politics were subordinated to evidence (of committees, office‐bearers,
annual fees, membership cards and minute‐keeping) that was marshalled merely to
assert the fact that these APDUSA branches’ existed. 70 Kayser and Adhikari’s limited
South African ‘Coloured’ Politics (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1987); Maurice
Hommel, Capricorn Blues: The Struggle for Human Rights in South Africa (Toronto: Culturama, 1981)
and Mary Simons, ‘Organised Coloured Political Movements’, in H.W. van der Merwe and C.J.
Groenewald (eds), Occupational and Social Change among Coloured People in South Africa (Cape
Town: Juta, 1976). Ironically, the latest work which sees the NEUM as an expression of coloured
radicalism is the analytically modest doctoral dissertation by Kayser’s co‐author, Mohamed
Adhikari. See Mohamed Adhikari, ‘Hope, fear, shame, frustration: Continuity and change in the
expression of Coloured identity in white supremacist South Africa, 1910‐1994’, unpublished Ph.D
Dissertation, University of Cape Town, July 2002.
69 See Chapter Three for a discussion of Clifton Crais’ approach to South African political history in
his book, The Politics of Evil.
70 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”’, p 12.
319