The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

These biographies of ‘great political lives’, in which individual public action is
abstracted, tend to follow a fairly conventional pattern of chronological narrative
with a sustained focus on the public political career. The subjects are narrated as
rather one‐dimensional and ungendered with the life course seen as an ordered
progression of acts and events, as a series of lessons learnt, and based on the
purposeful actions of rational actors. The lives recounted tend to read as dramatic
narratives from which the reader is meant to derive narrative pleasure. The lives are
presented as lived through epiphanies or turning point moments, with enigmas set
up pointing to future greatness or achievement. In these linear, cliographic
narratives, the biographies tend to be centred on stories told as lives overcoming
adversity, the achievement of greatness against the odds, the accumulation of
achievement in domestic and international politics, or the decisive impact of
supreme individuality upon the world. Narrative pleasure is achieved in the
resolution of the enigmas in the unfolding of the stories.
Biography as a genre of history outside the academy also offers readers and viewers
a field of public revelation and contestation, scoops on the ultimate truths about
lives. Some have sought emotional and psychological healing in literary
auto/biography as a therapeutic and cathartic space. 10 Others have tried to
sensationalise lives through ‘warts‐and‐all’ or ‘exposé’ biography by revealing, in
graphic detail, previously hidden dimensions of lives beyond the public eye,
especially of perceived sexual immorality or moral deviation and manifest
dishonesty. Assumed leadership or prominence of a political, literary, philosophical
or moral kind have laid people as varied as Winnie Mandela, Laurens van der Post,
Bertold Brecht and Mother Teresa open to biographic exposé and critique, often
leading to public contests over the facts and meaning of particular lives.
10 For a South African example of this, see Gillian Slovo, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country,
London: Little Brown, 1997.
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