The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

life’ and career as the focus have had a “troubled face” in academic historical studies.
Indeed, by the early 1980s, this genre ‐ at least in England ‐ seemed to have withered
away. 58 Writing of English historiography at this time, David Cannadine was moved
to pronounce that “there are no longer biographies of great men, because there are
no longer great men to biography”. 59 Indeed, the only way for a politician to ensure
the “much‐coveted life after death” entailed by biography was to write it himself,
and even better, to own a publishing company as well. 60
More than this, such histories have tended to lack scholarly legitimacy in the eyes of
many historians in the academy because they have been seen as a mode which was
unable to present social complexity and which encouraged “a simplified, linear
interpretation of events”. 61 The historian, Maurice Cowling, for example, has
criticised biography as misleading in its capacity to explain political phenomena:
Its refraction is partial in relation to the system. It abstracts a
man whose public action should not be abstracted. It implies
linear connections between one situation and the next. In fact
connections were not linear. The system was a circular
relationship: a shift in one element changed the position of all
the others in relation to the rest. 62
Because of such a tendency to produce a linear narrative, many historians, especially
in Britain, believed that biography had no place in serious historical scholarship.
Biographers, it was assumed, didnʹt even count as ‘proper historians’ doing ‘serious
history’. The range of questions that they posed about the past was seen as limited in
their complexity, and thus such biographical research was seen as having limited
academic value. Nevertheless, in the public domain, biography as a genre of
historical knowledge seems to have thrived. Public biographical treatments have
ranged from leadership lessons and exposé texts circulated in the publishing world,
58 Eric Homberger and John Charmley (eds), The Troubled Face of Biography, London: MacMillan Press,
1988.
59 David Cannadine, The Pleasures of the Past, London: Collins, 1989, p 286. The chapter from which the
quotation is taken was first published in 1982.
60 David Cannadine, The Pleasures of the Past, p 286.
61 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, p 72.
62 Cited in John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, pp 72‐3.
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