The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

was an arena of education that extended beyond the framework of formal schooling,
where teacher activists might have looked to other teachers and pupils as an entry
point to political work, and where teacher organisations were the mainstay of political
advancement. Indeed, beyond formal education, this was an entire programme in
public education, with its own pedagogy, through which the nation was ‘taken to
school’. 77
The NEUM and its component political organisations can be seen as a discursive
formation with its own vocabulary, body of representations and symbolic practices. 78
It constituted a new public sphere in which the subjectivity and identity of the non‐
racial subject was produced. 79 This was a space for the “non‐citizen” to exercise the
politics of citizenship in a republic of letters, 80 which saw the creation of a set of
institutions and structures, with their own codes and categories. At the same time, this
was a field of identity formation, within which black people, figured through the
unifying categories of ‘African’ and ‘non‐European’, were invited to become citizens in
a supra‐organisation, structured self‐consciously on ‘federal’ lines, as a microcosm of a
new nation in formation, understood as the product of historical progress. The
discursive construction of the subject in these spaces of knowledge production had
implications for the constitution of persons and the narration of personhood. It also
raised questions about the collective and the individual, and history and biography, as
77 I first encountered this concept in a discussion with former Cape Town teacher and TLSA
member, Joe Rassool in 1987.
78 For a highly suggestive study of a political movement as a discursive formation, see David E Apter
and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press,
1994).
79 The use of the notion of a ‘public sphere’ follows that developed by Jurgen Habermas. See Jurgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society, Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1991, as well as Craig Calhoun (ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere,
Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1992. See especially the critique developed by Nancy Fraser in ‘Rethinking
the Public Sphere: a Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Craig Calhoun
(ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere, where she presented a position which identified “subaltern
counterpublics”, which were “parallel discursive arenas”. Here oppressed and marginalized groups
“invent[ed] and circulat[ed] counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their
identities, interests and needs (p 123). See also Susan Herbst, Politics at the Margin.
80 This notion is drawn from David Morley and Ken Worpole (eds), The Republic of Letters: Working class
writing and local publishing (London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1982).
322