The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

documentary purposes were also demonstrated in their deployment of statements
presented during proceedings in apartheid criminal courts as enabling a transparent
window on ideas, acts and events in the past, without their order of evidence and
knowledge interrogated.
Likewise, the Tabata Collection has been mined as a repository of facts of resistance, to
enable records to be set straight. In this framework, Dora Taylor has been turned into a
mere comrade and WPSA member, a “left‐wing activist and intellectual” who “played
an important role within the NEUM as a political educator”, and who was later elected
to the executive. 71 Exile has been understood as merely an empirical stage of the
chronological course of a political movement. Apart from a brief reference indicating
some historical disagreement among members or former members of NEUM
affiliates, 72 the conception of formations such as the NEUM, UMSA and APDUSA was
one of internal consistency and unanimity. Kayser and Adhikari have missed out on
prior processes of narration and authorship, and indeed on the mediated nature and
storied character of the Tabata archive.
Transcending documentary methods
It is possible to transcend documentary methods by becoming more attuned to
questions about the ‘culture of politics’. Political history and intellectual history can
become open to cultural questions about the repertoires of resistance, the rituals of
spoken words and speech genres in public gatherings, and the written transcripts and
rhetorical strategies of the printed word. 73 With their focus on texts mainly as sources
of evidence for narrativised histories of politics or social life, documentary and social
historians have missed out on some of the more intriguing questions about language
71 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”’, pp 8‐9.
72 Kayser cites an article by APDUSA member, Norman Traub, ‘From the NEUM to UMSA: A
reply to Yousuf Rassool’, Marxist Discussion Journal, No 21, 2002.
73See Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Oxford: Polity Press,
1988, Tr. by Lydia G Cochrane) for a discussion of these matters. See also Robert Darnton,
‘Intellectual and Cultural History’, in Michael Kammen (ed), The Past Before Us: Contemporary
Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
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