The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

CHAPTER TWO
PUBLIC HISTORY, GREAT LIVES AND BIOGRAPHIC
CONTESTATIONS
Biography may have a specific history as a literary genre, and may have been central
to the life history research methods in the academic disciplines of sociology,
anthropology and history. However, perhaps the most significant mode of biography’s
existence has been outside the academy, where it has been an arena for the production
of memory. Political biography based on quite traditional concerns of self‐evident
leadership, with the nation seen as natural, and seeking to highlight the ‘role’ of the
remarkable individual, has continued to form the basis of much history that has been
produced in the public domain. Great lives have been turned into biographical lessons
in popular book series directed at young adults, while biographic productions in the
form of popular books and television documentaries have also sought to uncover
sensational truths about the lives of prominent individuals, sometimes resulting in
public biographic contestations.
Beyond the written text, biography has been a key feature of histories produced
through visual mediums and memorial landscapes. The genre of the Hollywood
biopic, where public history intersects with the making of celebrity, continues to focus
on exemplary lives. Conventional biography has also entered the landscape of national
heritage and symbolic topography in the form of ‘lieux de mémoire’ (‘sites’ or ‘realms’ or
memory) that seek to create ties of belonging for national subjects. 1 In spite of these
1 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, no. 26 (Spring
1989); see also Pierre Nora and Lawrence D Kritzman, (eds), Realms of Memory: The Construction of
the French Past (3 Volumes; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996‐1998); first published as
Pierre Nora (ed), Les lieux de mémoire (seven volumes; Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1984‐1992). As a
diverse emsemble of representational genres, lieux de mémoire are sites “where [cultural] memory
crystallises and secretes itself” (Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p 7). They articulate the
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