The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

This biographic world of saint veneration has been a constant feature of the Church as it
has modernised and supposedly tried to democratise itself in the face of legacies of
complicity with colonial and authoritarian regimes. While controversial cases of
canonisation continue to rear their head, as in the case of the “Nazi pope”, Pius XII,
there have been an increasing number of African and Asian saints, indicating papal
consciousness of political opportunity and even affirmative action. While some have
bemoaned sainthood’s “devaluation” as a result of “Vatican marketing decisions”,
others have hoped that the ‘democratisation of sainthood’ might show that “a saint is …
someone like us”. However, this supposed ‘democratisation’ might not have gone far
enough. The saintly emphasis has still been on “official role models”, with “too many
priests and nuns and not nearly enough of the lay people whom average Catholics
might more easily relate to”. The new saints, it seemed, were “not ordinary enough”. 54
Outside the halls of the academy, biographical productions and contests have been
restricted in large measure to the evidentiary realm of the empirical in the quest to
uncover hidden truths about the past. Apart from generating sensation through
exposing scandal, biography in the public domain has also tended to be associated with
notions of ‘celebrity’ and even voyeurism. The regular entry of biographic books on to
bestseller lists and their seeming popularity often have more to do with their promise of
providing exposés of hidden truths of famous lives rather than with the possibilities the
genre might hold for deeper explorations of identity, history and culture. This has
tended to limit the critical value of biography as a genre of public discussion and
engagement. 55
54 Melinda Henneberger, ‘The saints just keep marchin in’; Bonny Schoonakker, ‘The cross the
Catholic Church must bear’, Sunday Times, 19 September 1999; Peter Stanford, ‘Broadside fired
against canonisation of the “Nazi” pope’, The Sunday Independent, 24 November 2002.
55 See the article entitled ‘An unhealthy market in sensational lives’ in The Independent, 14 September
1996 for a discussion of the drawbacks of the biography boom in the popular literary market and the
dangers of biography, which sells itself by sensation and what happens in bedrooms. See further the
Preface to David Ellis (ed), Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, London: Pluto Press, 1993. See the
interesting case of a biography of Clint Eastwood, the subject of an ‘exposé’ biography, who sought
legal intervention in order to have passages of text declared ‘untrue’, and to compel publishers to
withdraw the biography from bookshops, and to revise its contents, as it might have damaged his
reputation (Cape Times, 27 December 2002).
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