The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

een backward‐looking. Their communitarian ideals may have
been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social
disturbance, and we did not. 85
This direction was initially propelled by concerted theoretical debate within
Marxism, and a challenge to Marxist historians to grasp the necessity of trying to
understand people in the past in the light of their own experiences rather than to
focus only on economic structures. 86 At issue was Marx’s argument that people
made history “only on the basis of conditions which are not of their own making”. In
the 1960s Louis Althusser had read this argument to mean the displacement of a
universal essence of ‘man’ and of the category of the subject from philosophy,
political economy and history. From this perspective, individuals could thus never
be agents (or ‘authors’) of history because their acts were prescribed by the historical
conditions made by others into which they had been born as well as the material
resources and culture they had received from previous generations. 87
For the social historians, in contrast, it was experience and agency which made the
connection between the structural and subjective feeling. In this approach to agency
and history, experience was the connection between social structure (‘being’) and
social consciousness. Social history became increasingly concerned with the pursuit
of new topics and the opening up of areas of research previously ignored. Located
within the framework of visibility, recovery and reclamation, social history sought to
present evidence about that which had been previously neglected, especially of the
experience of social class. Oral history formed the basis of much life history research,
which was seen as an important vehicle for the production of histories of ‘ordinary’
working class experiences. Life histories told through oral history had pride of place
in the generation of histories which sought the authentic “voice of the past”,
85 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage Books, 1963, pp 12‐13.
86 See the essay by E.P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors’, in his book The Povery
of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin, 1978.
87 See Louis Althusser, For Marx, London: Verso, 1966.
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