The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

aised walkway that was planned to traverse the cultural landscape of Mandela’s birth.
This was deemed to have constituted a serious and unauthorised physical intrusion
Mandela’s Mvezo birth site. As the project manager attempted to defend the
excavations, Callinicos and I gave our support to the SAHRA CEO to put a stop to the
walkway construction, and to hold meetings with the Museum council on alternative
plans for infrastructure development at Mvezo. 8 Ironically, just as I had been
conducting research on how Mandela’s biography was being translated into the
domain of national heritage, I found myself called upon to participate in resolving a
dispute over an aspect of the management of a site associated with his biography.
Meanwhile, in Cape Town, I was asked by an administrator from the UCT “Naming of
Buildings Committee” to assist in drawing up a guest list for a ceremony and luncheon
to celebrate the naming of a square as the Cissie Gool Plaza after the Cape Town
political leader and Communist Party member from the 1930s and 1940s, who had
become known as Cape Town’s ‘Joan of Arc’. Gool’s connection with the university
was outlined in the invitation as “the first black South African woman to receive a
Masters degree in psychology from a South African university” and as having gone on
to acquire a UCT law degree before entering legal practice as “the only … woman
advocate in South Africa at that time”. 9 Cissie Gool had been a focus of memory
recovery at the university as graduate students conducted recovery research on her
political career. 10
I had been approached, I thought, because of my District Six Museum connections and
because I was known to have done research on Cape Town’s resistance history. In
supplying the administrator with the requested guest list, I also chose to provide
8 This was where I met and briefly interviewed Nelson Mandela Museum Council Member, and
one time Council Chair, Archie Nkonyana, who had been a member of SOYA in the 1950s, and
whose political development had been strongly influenced at one time by I.B. Tabata.
9 Invitation to attend naming ceremony of Cissie Gool Plaza, UCT 3 July 2001.
10 Patricia van der Spuy wrote a doctoral dissertation, ‘Not only “Dr Abdurahman’s younger
daughter”’ from this research in 2002 and Gairoonisa Paleker produced a 52 minute documentary,
Cissie Gool, as part of her Masters studies.
508