The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

‘representivity’ would constitute and correlate collective memory. 102 Named and
naturalised into individual and collective categories, the status of people ‘hidden from
history’ is sustained and perpetuated as the polyglossia of identity is almost completely
obscured, differences concealed, and the relations of power that went into these
identities masked. 103
With the emphasis in social history (and in Abrams’ historical sociology) firmly on
collective identities, biography (styled as life history) produced in these frameworks
becomes a mechanism to view individuals (ordinary men and women) as units of social
forms and collective possibilities, as condensates of social relations and economic
processes and as repositories of group identities and consciousness, primarily of classes.
Individual lives become prisms through which to view and recover ‘larger issues’
(‘contexts’) of social structure as experienced collectively as forms of social control and
the agency of individuals who have been named into their essentialist identities and
group categories. 104
Literary scholar, Stephen Clingman, has articulated a similar framework in an attempt to
address the problem of individualism that “runs counter to a social perspective”. 105 He
suggests, following Lukacs, that “biographical subjects can also be used as ‘laboratory
specimens’, for exploring complex social and historical issues in the intense and
heightened focus of individual life”. 106 Exceptionality, for Clingman, may indeed be the
“key” to social representativeness. For Lukacs, “typicality” did not imply being
“average”. The “really typical figure” is one who “condenses in extreme and
concentrated form broader experiences otherwise dispersed variously through different
lives in society”. Typical figures “engage in their fullest potential with the social and
102 See Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa’, in Carli
Coetzee and Sarah Nuttall (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa.
103 Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, ‘Thresholds, Gateways and Spectacles’, pp 3‐5.
104 For examples of this approach, see Franco Ferrarotti, ‘On the Autonomy of the Biographical Method’,
in Daniel Bertaux (ed), Biography and Society and Paul Thompson, ‘Life Histories and the Analysis of
Social Change’, in the same volume.
105 Stephen Clingman, ‘Biography and Representation: Some Analogies from Fiction’, History Workshop
Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, February 1987, p 2.
106 Stephen Clingman, ‘Biography and Representation’, p 7.
40