The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

POSTSCRIPT
BIOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION AND HISTORICAL
PRACTICE
In the first ten years of democracy in South Africa, for a number of scholars, the terrain
of historical practice has undergone a number of important shifts. While some
historians have held on to firm ideas of knowledge hierarchies between the domains of
history and heritage, and notions of heritage as inferior, 1 significant processes of
historical production and contestation have occurred in various sites and institutions
outside the academy. In spite of the unwillingness of some historians to enter the
domain of heritage, with its “tainting atmosphere”, 2 a number of scholars have
embraced these transformations and have sought to extend their historical practice into
a range of sites and institutions as the field of public history became more layered and
multifarious. In some cases, this took place on the basis of historians’ academic and
disciplinary ‘expertise’ as researchers and educators. But in many instances, academics
who had entered the domain of public history found that they had to relinquish any
notion of academics as experts, as museums and heritage bodies cultivated spaces of
critical public scholarship and research excellence in their own terms. 3
I myself was drawn into a range of exciting and challenging institutions of public
history in a number of ways: as expert, policy maker, advisor and public scholar. I was
appointed by the Cabinet of the South African government to the Council of SAHRA
when it came into existence in 2000 as the official national heritage body which
developed policies and standards for conserving the ‘national estate’, comprising
1 See for example Jane Carruthers, ‘Heritage and History’.
2 Leslie Witz and Ciraj Rassool, ‘The Dog, the Rabbit and the Reluctant Historians’, South African
Historical Journal, No. 27, November 1992.
3 See my discussion of these relations and tensions in ‘Community museums, memory politics and
social transformation’.
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