The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

to the biographic constructions and contests over meaning that have characterised
the domain of memorials and exhibitions. 63
In most approaches to biography that can broadly be labelled ‘traditional’ or
conventional, the emphasis had been on stable individuality, self‐determination,
rational choice and the “autonomous, acting individual”. 64 Up to the 1970s and
1980s, the career of biography within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology as
well as in history was largely one devoid of reflexive, theoretical explanation and
analytical investigation of subjectivity and the production of lives. It is not surprising
that biography occupied an ambiguous place within the social sciences and history,
and that its most prominent forms of expression have been in the public domain as
lives of greatness or as exposé texts, which sought the truth of real lives. Behind
these biographical efforts lay an untheorised category of the individual whose
existence was largely taken for granted, whose identity was given, and just needed
to be grown into and the destiny found. The relationship of the individual with the
social was read through notions either of uniqueness and natural greatness or, as we
shall see, of typicality and representativeness.
Conventional biography and the ‘biographical illusion’
Conventional biography consisted of identification with and celebration of achievement,
and sought to plot the growth and development of the awareness and power of the
‘biographee’, celebrating the assumed consistency and coherence of character and
selfhood. It focussed on events rather than experience. 65 Selected moments deemed to be
significant ‐ usually centred on achievement ‐ were arranged in some chronological
order, following the linear trajectory of the individual’s development. In a search for
origins and processes of causation, foundational moments in the formation of aspects of
the individual’s life were sought. These were narrated into a plot of progress and
63 See Chapter Two.
64 Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, ‘Introduction: The Seductions of Biography’, in Mary Rhiel and David
Suchoff (eds), The Seductions of Biography, New York and London, 1996, pp 2‐4.
65 The area of psycho‐biography is perhaps an exception.
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