The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

committee members selected me to take up a Rockefeller Fellowship to the Center for
the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory University. I alone, however, am
responsible for the research findings and conclusions contained in this dissertation.
At UWC over many years, I benefited from various forms of support and assistance
from Colin Bundy (who was my original supervisor), Peter Kallaway, David Bunn,
Andrew Nash, Peter Vale, Arnold Temu, André Odendaal and John Hendricks. At
the District Six Museum, which tries to find new ways of reflecting on Cape Town’s
pasts, I have worked closely with and have learnt much from many colleagues,
especially Valmont Layne, Crain Soudien, Peggy Delport, Lucien le Grange, Stan
Abrahams, Terence Fredericks, Vincent Kolbe, Anwah Nagia, Sandra Prosalendis,
Tina Smith and Jos Thorne. I have benefited particularly from ongoing discussions
and exchanges with Irwin Combrinck, whose knowledge of Cape Town’s resistance
history is indeed encyclopaedic. I continue to be inspired by the Museum’s beauty
and complexity.
During the time of the production of this dissertation, I have been a full‐time
academic in History at UWC, fully immersed in programmes of teaching and
research, in all of its different phases and components over more than a decade. I
have benefited enormously from my colleagues and students in the stimulating and
challenging environment of the History Department. My own personal development
as a historian owes much to the myriad of conversations, seminar exchanges and
collaborative work with my colleagues, particularly Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley,
Patricia Hayes, Martin Legassick (who finished the supervision of this dissertation),
Andrew Bank, Premesh Lalu and Nicky Rousseau. Andrew Bank and Leslie Witz
also kindly did extra teaching and other work to give me more time to write. All my
colleagues have covered for me in many ways over a long time.
My exchanges and collaborations with my colleagues occurred in the cut and thrust
of undergraduate and postgraduate history teaching in settings ranging from the
People’s History Programme in the late 1980s and early 1990s to the more recent
programmes in Public History, Visual History and Museum Studies. They also took
place in the forums of the South African and Contemporary History Seminar, where
I continue to learn a great deal. These discussions and exchanges bore enormous
methodological fruit as a number of us began to rethink the conventions of resistance
history at the same time as apartheid gave way to democracy. While I take
responsibility for my own methodological formulations and approaches, I
acknowledge an enormous debt to my colleagues, particularly Leslie Witz and Gary
Minkley with whom I have worked most closely.
A long list of friends, colleagues, and political and cultural activists have provided
support, assistance, advice and encouragement in various ways, often without them
knowing it, including Bridget Thompson, Stanley Hermans, Tina Smith, Michael
Hands, Tina Schouw, Paul Grendon, David de Jong, Bupendra Makan, Donna
Pankhurst, Jon Lunn, Suzan Quilliam, Giorgio Miescher, Lorena Rizzo, Dag
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