Biography in post-apartheid South Africa: A call for awkwardness

ABSTRACT

Biography (with autobiography) has become the most popular type of non-fiction in South Africa, but the recent expansion of works has not inspired commentary. Here we describe four ‘constellations’ of biographies: political biographies of the individual-as-leader; social history biographies of the individual-as-exemplar; literary biographies of the individual-as-vessel-of-self; and critical studies biographies of the individual-as-fragmented-subject. Reviewing the politics of biography in South Africa and the nature of the project, we conclude that biography is an inescapably awkward enterprise, because of the intimate and fraught politics between author and subject, author and sources about the subject’s internal life, and author and audiences. Together with the authors in this Special Issue, we hold that it is generative to face the inevitable difficulties of biography and that it is not a failing to expose them to view.

KEYWORDS:

• South African biography
• political biography
• social history biography
• literary biography
• critical studies biography

Biographies and autobiographies are far and away the most popular genres of non-fiction in post-apartheid South Africa.¹ Some 800 biographies or autobiographies have been published in English in the 28 years since the liberalisation of apartheid and freeing of Nelson Mandela in February 1990.² If the vibrant market in biographies and autobiographies in Afrikaans were included, the output would far exceed a thousand monographs, let alone shorter and more popular forms of representation in film and print. What is more, the annual rate of biography publication has more than doubled since 2006. The market is primarily South African, with a minority of books published internationally.

Political biography and political autobiography are the dominant subfields of the genre. For our purposes, ‘political biography’ refers to the lives of those directly involved in politics, particularly political and religious leaders. Political biography and autobiography represent over half of all production by the life history industry over the last three decades. Both subgenres have flourished, with around 225 political biographies and some 200 political autobiographies.³ Other subfields of the genre are literary biographies and social history biographies, which hold a high historical and sociological significance, but a publication rate of only about one a year. In South African life histories, the political overshadows the rest.⁴

What has caused life histories to proliferate at such a dizzying rate? We suggest the immediate post-apartheid cohort of readers was driven primarily by a curiosity about diversity, a desire of individuals to read life stories that could not be told during the apartheid years, as well as the need to engage in some process of inner reckoning, of coming to terms with the pain and suffering of apartheid as narrated in accounts of the life paths of others. In this time of transition and optimistic uncertainty, biographies became a literature of inspiration with Nelson Mandela of course looming largest. While we like to think that curiosity, interest in diversity, and empathy with the suffering of fellow citizens might still play a role in readers’ selections, we suspect the profound moral crisis of the African National Congress (ANC) under the presidency of Jacob Zuma has shaped reading habits of the second generation. The contemporary crisis has pushed readers, now able to choose between some 20 biographies and almost as many autobiographies every year. The interest of this recent reading public might be about groping towards re-imagining political possibilities in the light of a depressing spiral of revelations about corruption, failing social services and ultimately state capture.

Life histories serve many needs. They assuage our curiosity about famous people. By showing us more about those who have led lives of usefulness and reputation, they inspire us. They instruct South Africans on what it means to be members of a society in transformation and citizens of a new country. So, it is curious that, aside from just a few recent review essays (see Gagiano 2011; Lodge 2015; Lindsay 2017), the genres have not provoked more probing critique. Biography, the historians’ form of life history writing, merits fuller attention. In this Introduction, we review the field of South African biography (with some forays into lives led in other countries) over the past several decades.

To begin our discussion, we ask you to imagine that you are looking up at a night sky. Think of the points of light as biographies. The sky has many, many stars. As the light emanated long ago from stars, biographies are what remains visible in the wake of a human life. The stars vary in brightness and are distributed unevenly; some are isolated, while others are collected in bands that put out considerable light. Yet we also register that other regions of the sky remain quite dark. We know that we do not see the individual bright points and clusters as they were at their origin. We have learned that their strong light does not shine directly toward our earth, but comes to us through warped space and transformed by the gravitational pull of dark energy and dark matter (DeGrasse Tyson 2017). Just as astrophysicists incorporate these dark energies and forces into their equations, so biographers should engage with the often unseen or less examined contrary forces that we call ‘awkward’.

Our argument is that biography is an inherently awkward project. All writing is refracted through the politics of production and reception, but we hold that biography is more awkward than autobiography or history in general, because of the intimate and fraught politics between author and subject, author and sources about the subject’s internal life, and author and audiences who may be very invested in certain depictions of a well-known subject. Biographers can feel pressure to elide the awkwardness. We hold that they have been too often judged on how they hide or resolve it. In contrast, we and the authors in this Special Issue propose that it is generative to face the inevitable difficulties of biography and insist we must keep them in view. We publish this Special Issue to provide an opening space for deeper criticism and reflection, for candid admissions and realistic reception. Our aim is to provide a solid foundation for the critique and appreciation of biographies, one based on the possibilities of facing up to awkwardness.

While we are the first to embrace the epithet awkward, we build on the work of those biographers of South Africans who have already conveyed the fraught nature of their projects, such as Hedley Twidle in wry ruminations on his own and others’ attempts to narrate the life of Verwoerd assassin Demetrios Tsafendas (2015), Louise Viljoen in her admission of her sense of violation in reading the pained love letters of Ingrid Jonker (2012), and Mark Gevisser in his unsettling quest to represent the life of a South African president with a rapidly changing public image (2007). Because a biography is by one person about another, we find sobering resonances with the journalist Janet Malcolm’s much-quoted description of her profession:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. (1990: 3)

The inevitable intimacy in a one-on-one author-subject relationship and the public broadcast of the distilled essence of one person’s life has the potential to turn biography into betrayal. This sense of betrayal may also come from the practice of interviewing, if a biographer of living subjects ingratiates himself with a subject or a subject’s relatives or friends to convince them to share their secrets. Biographers can also betray dead subjects by misreading their records, denigrating their efforts, or being condescending towards them (Lepore 2001). The fraught politics of biography are widely recognised, but here we make a case that lingering on and working with the awkward relationships between author and subject, author and audience, and author and sources deepens the quality of the work.

To bring specificity to our consideration of the awkward politics of South African biography, we classify existing biographies into four primary constellations, each held together by a shared understanding of individual agency: first, political biographies of the individual-as-leader; second, social history biographies of the individual-as-exemplar; third, literary biographies of the individual-as-vessel-of-self; and, fourth, critical studies biographies of the individual-as-fragmented-subject. In our selective survey of the field below, we describe the pattern of the constellation, discuss how the dark energy of awkwardness conditions what we can see of even its brightest stars, and reveal the discomforting gravitational pull experienced by our authors as they work from within one of these subgenres.

Individual-as-leader in political biography

The largest and brightest of our constellations is the individual-as-leader in political biography. We have identified 225 works of political biography published since 1990. Political biography in this most traditional form conceives of history as past politics, which is understood as the achievements of highly placed powerful individuals. At one time, both these individuals and the published life histories were of white men. All but one of the 143 autobiographies listed in librarian Rowse Ushpol’s A Select Bibliography of South African Autobiographies were written by white South Africans with 84 per cent of the authors having been men (1958). While we do not have comparable statistics for biography, the proliferation of life histories of powerful white men strongly suggests that this racial and gendered bias would apply here too. At the time of Ushpol’s survey some 20 biographies of the mining magnate and Cape premier, Cecil John Rhodes, had already been published, most of them hagiographic accounts by former friends (Maylam 2005: 1–4). The Great Men are now black as well as white. By 2017 there had been 54 post-apartheid biographies of Nelson Mandela. South Africa’s other Nobel Peace Prize-winning men also feature prominently. Over a hundred biographies celebrate the lives of male leaders of the resistance movement turned post-apartheid ANC politicians, making them, by quite some way, the most prominent feature on book-lists.

The first form of awkwardness in political biography has to do with a biography’s relationship to nationalist orthodoxy. In the South African context, political biographies have drawn the same critique as struggle histories elsewhere that valorise liberation organisations. In his unpublished doctoral dissertation Ciraj Rassool took aim at late 20^th-century political biography (broadly defined) for having created a male and Congress-dominated field of South African black resistance studies (2004). This tradition, he said, accepted masculine nationalism as the culmination of collective character and presented a teleology of ANC leadership rising to prominence without consideration of the contested politics involved in producing those narratives. While vigorously taking Rassool to task on other points, Jonathan Hyslop concurred on this matter, warning that ‘the whole historical enterprise in South Africa is threatened by attempts to impose an official narrative of the liberation struggle, centred on the ANC and its leadership, into which the entire history of modern South Africa is subsumed’ (2010: 104). Heather Hughes, author of a biography of the founding president of the ANC, John Dube, has discovered a potentially positive way forward by turning the critique of biography as nationalist hagiography around: histories of individuals can be the starting point for deconstructing nationalist received wisdom (2012). And yet near-hagiography continues.

In this context, writing on members of political traditions other than that of the ANC can be awkward in contradicting market expectations. The exception that proves the rule is the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko who has been incorporated into the fold of national icons and is the subject of several recent works. There are belated signs of the marketability of the life stories of leaders of the liberal opposition and other political parties. Alongside two recent biographies of stalwart Progressive Federal Party (PFP) leader Helen Suzman, we can now place freshly published life histories of Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Mmusi Maimane, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema, and United Democratic Movement (UDM) leader Bantu Holomisa.

But where are the books about nationalist women? Only 15 per cent of authors choose women as their book-length biographical subjects.⁵ It is noteworthy that there are almost as many biographies of activists’ wives as there are of women activists in their own right. In the best documented cases, the categories of woman activist and activist’s wife overlap, notably those of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Ruth First who emerge as the two dominant figures in life histories of political women in South Africa. In fact, we have been able to identify only nine biographies on women anti-apartheid activists who were not also activists’ spouses published across the last 28 years! This is a truly astonishing silence given that biographies of male heroes of the struggle, as they are usually cast in this genre, number well in excess of a hundred.

Madikizela-Mandela and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma are the rare female anti-apartheid activists turned ANC parliamentarians to feature in book-length biographies in the period under review.⁶ Any study of leadership in the ANC in the late 1980s, for example, will of necessity prioritise male leaders given that only three of the 35 members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) were female (Russell 1989: 107). But, as many scholars have demonstrated, one does not have to be a national leader or on an executive committee to live a political life (Hassim 2006 & 2014). Hughes has argued that the historiography is deficient, that the tendency to depict women in support roles under-represents the degree of their public leadership and is therefore misleading history (Hughes 2012). It is incumbent on the field to recognise that women in social welfare movements such as Bertha Mkhize lived storied and intentional lives of activism (Healy-Clancy 2017). This is not just a matter of writing women into existing political histories. Broadening the concept of political biographies to include local leaders, volunteers, and staff organisers can only improve our understandings of political history, while bringing many more women’s lives into view.

The most discomforting form of awkwardness in political biographies of men or women lies in areas where the subject’s personal life complicates, or even contradicts public understandings. Concentrating on political costs and social – rather than personal – tensions may spare historians and their readers from unsettling revelations about a known and admired figure. Life’s inevitable compromises in matters of intimacy and self-respect seem less problematic when trimmed to a narrative of a heroic journey across a racialised political and economic landscape. In an important review of recent political biographies, Tom Lodge, the biographer of Mandela’s public persona (Lodge 2007), discusses the challenge of finding the appropriate level of circumspection about private life:

In South African life history, in more ways than is usual in biography, family is a protectively hidden or even a consciously suppressed domain, all the more difficult to reconstruct. (2015: 687–8)

Writing on the intersections of the private and public lives of the Malawian-born leader of the radical Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) Clements Kadalie, Henry Dee’s article in this Special Issue foregrounds pre-apartheid anxieties over black masculinity. Skilfully recreating the roles of women and gender relations in Kadalie’s life, Dee deepens our appreciation of the degree to which the ICU was an unusually sexually inclusive organisation in this early period of anti-government protest. He explores how Kadalie went from a ‘bad boy’ radical at the head of a trade union with an unprecedented number of women leaders in the 1920s, to a ‘good boy’ candidate in Advisory Board elections during the 1940s when he excluded his activist wives from his misleadingly sober autobiography. Can a biographer really retain respect for this trade union pioneer in the light of so many awkward revelations about his ‘trail of debaucheries’ (in the words of a contemporary)?

Readers’ investments in heroic biography can be fierce. They may resist candid reinterpretations of the character of those whom they claim to know. Biographers who aim to write an explicitly intimate history of a political life may face a briar patch of trouble. The Indian reception of a recent international work on Mohandas K Gandhi illustrates this controversy (Bajaj & Bosman 2011). In South Africa, too, those writing on Gandhi have exposed his limitations, as a father (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2004), and most controversially as racially prejudiced. In Stretcher Bearer for Empire Ashwin Desai & Goolam Vahed (2016) unpacked an element of ambiguity in his racial ideology and provoked a visceral public uproar that included death threats against the authors (Desai & Vahed 2015; Vahed 2016). Reflecting on the experience, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2007) has questioned whether scholarly academic argument, with its need for complexity, nuance and evidentiary protocol, can be effectively translated for a public readership.

These are important warnings, but some political biographers have worked skilfully with awkward matter and dark energy. They have shown it is possible to write, in particular, of male political figures without allowing their leadership to serve as an explanation for itself and without assuming any simple correlation between leader, dominant political tradition and social change. Refusing to take leadership for granted, a set of presidential biographies allowed reading publics to start thinking collectively about the end of apartheid and the beginning of what came next. Lodge, especially, is deliberate in his framing of Mandela as a leader, drawing attention to Mandela’s own relationship with this role. As a boy, Mandela observed public politics and was inculcated with a notion of proper leadership. As a man, he developed a sense of destiny and acted accordingly. Because Mandela was outward-facing, so is this biography, delivering a critical account of how he could embody that role (Lodge 2007).

Gevisser’s biography of Thabo Mbeki had an entirely different challenge: to explain the life of an ascendant hero who became an anti-hero even while research was underway. Mbeki was notoriously prickly about disagreement and Gevisser commendably addressed this (2007). The work is most awkward around Mbeki’s sorest spot, his HIV/AIDS policy, as Mbeki both defended his indefensible position and tried to obscure it. In the best biographical tradition, Gevisser intertwines Mbeki’s psyche, philosophy, and politics with literary inspiration (Twidle 2012). Apart from Mbeki’s sudden fall from the ANC leadership, this book might have been a user’s manual for the ‘new’ South African government for years after his presidency ended. As it turned out, A Dream Deferred stands as an accomplished history of a society and political movement, and a sensitive study of a difficult subject.

Cyril Ramaphosa was still far from the presidency when Anthony Butler produced his biography, which projected his future – in the event rightly – as the national leader (2007 & 2013). His subject’s refreshing lack of interest in having his life history told produces a work of many strengths but also some notable silences. Forced by necessity to interview an impressively wide range of Ramaphosa’s friends and comrades, Butler provides a thick description of the political organisations where Ramaphosa cut his political teeth (2018). On the other hand, the absence of personal testimony beyond a single interview transcript leaves him unsure about many of the most fundamental aspects of Ramaphosa’s personal life: why he became a law student, what the impact of almost two years of youthful detention had on his life, how he views himself as a father and family man, and even whether he should in fact be regarded as a very private person.

What about biographies of those on the other side of the political divide? Jacob Dlamini’s work Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (2014) is a story of one person, technically qualifying it as a biography. But Dlamini does not even disclose his subject’s name in the introduction. We only hear Glory Sedibe’s testimony about his own life in chapter 8 when we have enough context to disbelieve it. Dlamini’s meticulous research on Sedibe was not to treat him as a singular person, but rather to learn why any person could become an askari. Dlamini breaks down different categories of collaborator and acts of collaboration and shows us how such distinctions make all the difference to understanding human action in repressive societies. But ultimately Dlamini cannot answer why Sedibe or any other askaris killed for the racists who tortured them. Drawing attention to such uncertainty, Dlamini provides a complete inversion of heroic struggle biographies; 15 years ago, the work would have found an uncomfortable reception, but the willingness to question standard narratives of the struggle is now deepening. Still, the book also gestures at lives Dlamini chose not to expose because they remain too raw, too implicated, too related to his family, and too unexceptional in their compromises. The awkwardness of revealing collaboration remains a powerful force in political biographies of 20^th-century South Africans.⁷

Askaris were not the only functionaries of the apartheid state whose biographies require awkward encounters and unsettling negotiations. Lindie Koorts’ empathetic account of the first apartheid prime minister, DF Malan, shares Jacob Dlamini’s quest to unsettle reductionist racial narratives. She invites us to understand the vulnerabilities of a racist leader through a deep engagement with the life story of a shy and sincere Afrikaner boy who remained devoted to the idea of service to his people. She proposes that one can still treat such a life with empathy rather than retrospective judgement despite the destructive legacy of his political actions (Koorts 2014).⁸ There have also been several biographies of the most brutal functionaries of the apartheid state, with three dedicated to mass murderer Eugene de Kock (1998, 2006 & 2015) and another on Dirk Coetzee (1991). The belated emergence of this as a subgenre, we assume, is due to the difficulty of telling stories of complicity and collaboration at a time when memories of apartheid were still too raw (LJ Bank & A Bank 2013). Intelligence operatives are spilling their secrets in autobiographies (for example, Barnard 2015), but biographers have not yet taken them on.

Two articles in this Special Issue deal with men from neighbouring countries who were collaborators negotiating awkward complicities with a settler state and the apartheid government. Because these men did not achieve their ambitions, their cases draw attention to the forces that support or impede self-fashioning. Allison Shutt asks us to re-imagine the political career of Jasper Savanhu, a Southern Rhodesian radical trade unionist turned Central Africa Federation member of parliament (MP) and from 1959, the highest ranking African in the Federation government. In the 1970s, Savanhu tried but was unsuccessful at attracting a biographer who would depict him as he saw himself – as a sincere and pragmatic reformist with the welfare of his fellow Africans at heart. Scholars have cast Savanhu as marginal to Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial struggle, but such treatment reinforces the Federation-era authority to name political and ethical winners and losers, and misses an opportunity to examine more deeply how Federation politics narrowed what was possible for Zimbabwe’s future.

Nancy Jacobs had to confront the fact that Washington Okumu was not the avuncular Kenyan senior statesman who had achieved a moment of fame in mediating the inclusion of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in South Africa’s April 1994 election, but an opportunistic and shadowy go-between for hire by white American, South African, and British conservative Christians. Indeed, this expressly non-African connection explains how he came into a position of influence in 1994. But explaining Okumu’s life has not been easy, largely because the stories he told about it were so often patently false. What obligation does a researcher have to a person who invited her to conversation in his home and offered open access to his personal papers? Must a biographer take direction from a duplicitous subject and privilege his version of his life? Shutt and Jacobs have both considered awkward questions and produced biographies that contradict some sureties.

Individual-as-exemplar in social history biography

Less conspicuous than the political history constellation of individual-as-leader is that cluster of social history works that consider the individual as exemplar of wider sociological categories. These writings expose the trials and document the quotidian lives of ordinary people. The lessons of humanistic social history have been crystallised in narratives about individuals who serve as representatives of non-elite experiences. They are the antitheses of the Great Men. The form emerged in the 1980s and was driven, within South Africa, by the Wits History Workshop and, outside South Africa, by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies seminar at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (compare Matsetela 1982; Marks 1986 & 1987; Keegan 1988; Bozzoli & Nkotsoe 1991). We have identified no more than 30 stars in the constellation of social history biography in post-apartheid South Africa.

Because these lives were not consistently documented and archived, this form of biography is heavily dependent on oral evidence. Beyond the stand-alone stories of exemplary people, histories of all kinds use individual lives, researched through interviews as well as documents, as illustrations of broader processes. For example, the editors of this Special Issue have showcased the lives and works of individuals in scientific networks, with particular attention to the agency of African environmental experts and female social scientists, as a way to think about broader social dynamics (A Bank & LJ Bank 2013; Jacobs 2015 & 2016; Bank 2016). In their social histories, other contributors to this Special Issue have also attended to individual lives (Landau 1995; Healy-Clancy 2014; Shutt 2015).

The best of social history biographies shine as brightly as the finest political biographies, but they, too, reach us shaped by the force of awkwardness. Dark matter and energy will complicate the orbit of author and subject. Social historians tend toward an ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable through narratives about struggles under oppressive conditions. Africanist discussion of author-subject relations dates back to the feminist life history writing of the 1980s which was motivated to record the experiences of women who had not featured in the colonial and elite nationalist record. But writing people into history is not so simple. Like feminist writing about women’s lives in other parts of Africa, this genre soon faced pressing questions to do with the power of northern/western academics over the representation of African lives (Townsend 1990; Hoppe 1993; Gengenbach 1994).

In South Africa similar debates have clustered around the legacy of the Wits History Workshop which, it is remembered, used the language of class to explore ‘history from below’. Workshop participants spoke back to power by narrating the struggle for academic and wider audiences. Convinced of the virtue of that project, historians’ own position in the interplay of power and knowledge production typically went unexamined (Witz, Minkley & Rassool 2017: 4–9), even into the 1990s when feminist and post-colonial theorists were working through these questions. Attention to race as a discourse and a technology of power that insinuated itself into knowledge production lagged (Lissoni, Nieftagodien & Ally 2010; Posel 2010). Most explosively, the nationalist provocateur Andile Mngxitama decried the social history project in the History Workshop as anti-black racism fomented by white people with a ‘colonial desire to study and to save the native from himself’ (quoted in Hyslop 2012: 10).

Not just around the History Workshop, but throughout academia on every continent, non-African and white biographers of Africans have been asked to account for their own position in relationship to their subaltern subjects. What right, it has been asked, does a white author of another race or from another country or continent have to re-narrate the life of a black person who already lived too much at the command of privileged whites? Can self-awareness and self-reflectivity ameliorate the imbalance? Given that over three-quarters of political, literary or social history biographies of South Africans have been written by white authors, local or international,⁹ these questions press on the field. A general response from the historical discipline could be that no contemporary author has perfect consilience with their historical subjects. But an awkwardly framed biographical approach holds that power-knowledge dynamics of all sorts require unpacking. In contemporary Africa, differences of race, gender, and global position still determine that research will be fraught and it is necessary to grapple with the implications of these power-knowledge dynamics. Yet it is also true that biographers whose identity matches that of their subjects will also come to the interaction from a position of power. All biographers who accept Malcolm’s point that there is no innocence in the project of writing about another will question the ethics of their own methods and analysis.

Charles van Onselen’s magisterial biography of Kas Maine, The Seed is Mine (1996) is iconic of the individual-as-exemplar social history approach and illuminates its challenges. Van Onselen’s objective was ‘to describe and analyse the behaviour of a single person within an appropriate class context, whilst at the same time doing justice to the peculiarities of the personality and psychology of the individual’ (1993: 498). This biography follows the self-actualising arc common to the genre, but the mounting segregation of 20^th-century South Africa made his story one of unfulfilled talent and intentions. In his richly described achievements and ultimate disappointments, Maine became emblematic of black experience. The book evoked effusive tributes but also strongly-worded objections. Van Onselen’s elevation of sociological over interpretive questions fed allegations that Maine had served more as an allegorical resistance figure in segregationist South Africa than as the subject of his own life. The book was based on oral evidence, yet was light on direct quotations from, let alone self-framing by, the taciturn Maine. Van Onselen’s use of evidence led critics to object to his ‘modernist appropriation of oral discourses’ (Minkley & Rassool 1998: 94). Furthermore, there was intense debate about whether the 14 years that Thomas Nkadimeng spent as primary interviewer, mediator and translator should not have earned him more than a customary sentence or two in the book’s Acknowledgements (Van Onselen 1996: viii). Some responses were harsh and heavy-handed: to the extent that Van Onselen took authorial power to reason on Maine’s behalf, it was warned that The Seed is Mine ‘might herald a new White, European, neo-colonialist discourse’ (Worsfold 2000: 175). Still, after the cultural turn and at a time when South Africa was achieving majority rule, surely critics were justified in their claims that the book’s thick description and analytical power was not accompanied by sufficient openness about awkward matters involved in the process of its production.

By contrast, Jonny Steinberg’s biography of Magadien Wenzel aka William Steenkamp, The Number (2004), is refreshing for its frank account of his complex relationship with a serial recidivist criminal. Steinberg illustrates the remarkable power of story-telling, and the slipperiness of the boundaries between history and mythology. At the heart of Wentzel’s extended late-career confession is a mythologised story of a Zulu social bandit, ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, whose warren of followers in the disused mine-dumps of the Witwatersrand shortly after the turn of the 20^thcentury relieved hapless miners of their hard-earned cash. Steinberg shows how an idealised, orally transmitted version of the Nongoloza story served as the model for regulating a rigid hierarchy of relationships in national prisons. The Nongoloza myth later spilled out from the prisons to the gang-ruled streets of the Cape Flats. The awkwardness here is not about an unbridgeable social divide or inequitable research relationship between author and subject. The discomfort derives instead from doubts about the verifiability of the remarkable narrative. With no footnotes, some 50 witnesses represented only by their pseudonyms in order to protect their reputations (Steinberg 2004: iii), and with most of Wentzel’s most intimate contacts choosing to be silent about a man they had known hitherto mainly as a serial abuser, we are asked to take Steinberg and Wentzel, both distinguished by their skill at storytelling, at their word. Caught between the quality of the story and questions about its veracity, the reader is in a difficult position.

Katie Makanya, the female Zulu medical assistant to Dr James McCord in Durban, was more dedicated to the biographical project and certainly a good deal more respectable in social terms than Wentzel. These factors seem to have ameliorated the awkwardness in this social history biography. She was nearly 80 years old in 1954 when she convinced McCord’s daughter Margaret to become her biographer. Margaret McCord recorded hundreds of hours of interviews on reel-to-reel tapes, but having no professional position as an historian or biographer, it took her decades to transcribe and process Makanya’s testimony. Although The Calling of Katie Makanya was met with great acclaim when it did eventually get published (McCord 1995), McCord also addressed the discomfort that she, as a white American woman, felt in writing about someone who had been her father’s employee (Burns, Ngwenya & McCord 2002). She described the complexities in her family’s close relationship with Makanya. Ultimately, it was that intimacy, Makanya’s trust, and her open self-awareness regarding her unenviable position that revealed and thus diffused the awkwardness.

Individual-as-vessel-of-self in literary biography

The next constellation is of works in literary biography. We use the term to refer to biographies where the inner life, emotional, imaginative and otherwise, is the central underlying motif. Often written by practitioners of disciplines that specialise in the analysis of expression and subjectivity, the subjects, too, are writers, artists or musicians. As biographies, they are generally more attuned to interiority than the political or social varieties. They are also a comparatively small group, with only a few dozen interior-oriented biographies of literary figures published in this field since 1990.

Literary biography, with some spectacular exceptions, seems to have resolved its awkwardness more than the other forms. The subjects presented are often humanists and their biographers strive towards empathetic engagement. Unlike social history biography, where there are markedly unequal power relationships between author and subject, the biographer and the authors or artists are something closer to peers. Authors and artists are not naïve about representation and representing them seems less unfair. Finally, there are usually sufficient source materials for the work. Yet the issues of privacy and the extent of revelations about personal lives which impact on professional achievement and political activism remain a potential source of discomfort. As such, literary biography is awkward in its own way.

The 2003 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, JM Coetzee, towers over South African literary autobiography and, more to our point, biography. JC Kannemeyer’s authorised 710-page tome on Coetzee’s life, first published in Afrikaans and translated by Michiel Heyns (2012), professes to convey no more than the plain unvarnished tale as Coetzee wanted it told. While he does this with satisfying rigour, his skirting around the distant emotional life and glossing over of the estranged family relations of this painfully private man are discomforting silences. David Atwell’s account is less awkward but much less satisfying as biography, given its predominant textual orientation (2015).

Bram Fischer was not a literary figure, but he lived an epistolary life and his hundreds of letters to his parents, wife, children, and others survive. This allowed Stephen Clingman, who is trained in English literature, to produce an identity-focused reading of his experiences. In fact, Clingman is deeply empirical, frequently quoting and discussing these sources. But because of Fischer’s effusively expressive archive, his biographer was able to analyse his unfolding senses of himself as an Afrikaner, a white man, a South African, an anti-imperialist, and a communist. Often Clingman returns to Fischer’s humanitarian nature, an identity that helps us understand his communist convictions and personal generosity, but raises questions about how he could reconcile these values with Stalinism. The awkwardness within Fischer inheres in this biography (Clingman 1997).

In South Africa: Art + Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele (2008) the cultural historian, Diana Wylie faced a much slimmer archive. Mnyele left few private documents or public records about events in his life and those traces that do remain, including records about the circumstances of his death, are often contradictory. But we include this biography in the literary constellation because of its extraordinary sensitivity to the subject’s creative expression; as an artist, Mnyele communicated through pictures, which become sources about his life. Wylie, who knew Mnyele, also conducted more than 70 interviews with his friends, family, and associates. Although he is remembered as a political martyr, she shows him to be something more human. We understand his shyness, his love of music, and his evolving convictions. We see his ambivalences. This biography allows us to see Mnyele negotiating with a demanding world and yet finding channels for the expression of his changing self.

In other cases, source materials may allow the biographer imaginative space for empathetic engagement, but the revelations can be intensely painful for both author and readers. Reflecting on the profoundly unsettling experience of reading the poet Ingrid Jonker’s love letters, Louise Viljoen struggles with the dubious ethics of ‘invading another’s private space’ (2012: 14). And yet what lingers after reading her taut narrative of Jonker’s life and work is gratitude to her for having been willing to endure this painful work rather than any sense of judgement. She is ever respectful towards her fragile subject and wisely cognisant of the personal and literary constraints and possibilities, especially of Jonker’s remarkable achievements as a young Afrikaner woman writer. She is adept at allowing those outside of Afrikaans literature to develop an appreciation of the direct, vivid, beautiful, unique, and unflinchingly honest poetic imagination of Ingrid Jonker, as well as a partial understanding at least of how this emerged out of what were, in the end, her unbearable experiences of childhood and love (Viljoen 2012).

Clingman, Wylie, and Viljoen find their subjects sympathetic, so their critical observations about Fischer, Mnyele, and Jonker are awkward in an accepting way. This is not always the case. The sympathy between Nadine Gordimer and her biographer Ronald Suresh Roberts evaporated in an infamous fallout that resulted in her withdrawing authorisation for No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer (Roberts 2005). The immediate problem was that Gordimer objected to revelations about, and interpretations of, her personal life. In biographical theorist Headley Twidle’s reading of the controversy, what began as an incisive depiction that productively engaged with Gordimer’s self-understanding became unmoored. One problem was that Roberts’s concurrent project of writing a biography, ‘or rather hagiography’ of Thabo Mbeki infused the book about Gordimer. Mbeki’s diatribes about racial and scientific authority, Twidle suggests, taint Roberts’s treatment of Gordimer (Twidle 2018: 112). Under these conditions, awkwardness turned toxic.

In her contribution to this Special Issue, Meghan Healy-Clancy avoids the tendency to construct a single image of Gordimer as a biographical subject. When Gordimer came of age as a writer of short stories, novels and documentary exposés of township life in the 1950s, she still had the freedom to invent her own, then still seemingly relatively secure, sense of self: she was a white woman protest writer immersed in a dynamic and multiracial counterculture. But as her black friends were forced into exile one by one, and as rigid censorship laws stifled what anti-apartheid writers were allowed to say, she was forced to re-invent a much more introverted and ambiguous self-image, as a vehement public enemy of apartheid’s censors, ardently championing the rights of white and black South African writers against the interference of ‘illiterate’ bureaucrats. In the 1980s she re-invented herself anew, now as a ‘comrade writer’ with an overt commitment to further the politics of liberation, culminating in a 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Iona Simon Mayer whom Andrew Bank writes about in this Special Issue, also re-invented herself, but with more evident ambivalence and struggle. Drawing on late-life interview records, oral testimony from feminist friends and published writings, Bank argues that Simon Mayer had a moment of self-actualisation during the 1970s when she was able to resolve her life-long inner tension between the head and the heart. Through her earlier collaborative scholarship on the Eastern Cape countryside and the city of East London, she had forged an intellectual connection with Africans as subjects of study. But it was her involvement in a Black Sash circle of feminist-activists in Grahamstown that belatedly sparked her ability to express her latent humanism through writing. The awkwardness in her story relates to the inner conflict she experienced across her professional career about credit for her collaborative research with her husband. But given that she herself became intensely uncomfortable in late life with the way in which she had made earlier demands for joint recognition, is Bank’s revised narrative of co-production a betrayal of how she had come to make sense of her ‘subsidiary’ career?

Individual-as-fragmented-subject in critical biography

Apart from the problematic politics, ethics, and discomfort of narrating the development of another’s sense of self, some find the analytic project of turning an unformed thing inside out impossible. Representing this position is a small constellation low on the horizon that presents the individual as a fragmented subject. We situate this cluster at the margins deliberately; it is the most difficult to discern and trickiest to use for navigation.

Uncritical engagement with both documentary and oral sources has drawn comment in South African and other African biography. As described above, Rassool called out South African political biography (and related works in political history) for depicting a landscape dominated by Congress-tradition leaders. Connecting this to the positivist tendencies of social science writers, he objected to a swath of biographies of ANC leaders in the Karis and Carter Collection and in the flood of published books and commemorative celebrations after apartheid. The problem, he averred, was that these:

linear biographic constructions, born out of realist projects where subjects were thought to have lived lives in chronological narratives, served to perpetuate a modernist fantasy about society and selfhood, and a ‘biographical illusion’. (Rassool 2010: 29)

Of course, historians and biographers well know that they cannot represent the past ‘as it actually was’. Among historians of Africa, David William Cohen has had wide influence as he drew attention to the diversity and complexity of processes of narrative production about competing versions of the past (1994). Historians and biographers have always laid emphasis on critical readings of sources, but until confronted by the ‘post-’ moves of the late 20^th century, many were not interested in the archive reproducing them (Hamilton, et al 2002). Objections were also raised about unconsidered uses of oral evidence, about selecting and combining snippets of evidence to define a person and plot their life’s trajectory. Dating back to the 1980s, feminist Africanists critiqued how interview-based life-histories interpret oral evidence and debated the resulting portrayals of lives (Townsend 1990; Hoppe 1993; Gengenbach 1994). Luise White, who has worked deeply and creatively with oral evidence, stated its challenge for biographical writing clearly:

How can we know what someone was like – what they felt and thought – in their twenties without rewriting their lives for them? What someone says in 1990 about himself or herself in 1935 is taken to be true because the same person is doing the talking. Historians rarely ask if the experience is described with the insights of 1990 or 1935. (White 2000: 65)

The very ideology infusing biographical writing has also come under fire in post-structuralist theory. The genre inevitably valorises life as the achievements (or occasionally the failures) of the individual, a concept which is a historically and culturally specific construction of post-Enlightenment European bourgeois culture. Dipesh Chakrabarty includes biography with the novel, the autobiography, and history as ‘one of the four basic genres that help express the modern self’ (2000: 34).

Biographers who disavow the stable and transcendent as a modernist trope, seek other strategies to narrate a life, but moving too far from expected modes can grate. The biographer of Cyril Ramaphosa, Anthony Butler, was as aware as anyone of the limitations of his story, but saw little to be gained from problematising the form:

Constant reminders from purportedly ‘post-modern’ biographers about the ‘unknowability’ and ‘relational character’ of their subjects only serve to irritate readers, while books that escape entirely the confining assumptions of chronology are simply incomprehensible. (2007: xii)

One strategy is to experiment with narrative form. Roger Levine’s biography of a Xhosa chief’s son-turned-missionary Jan Tzatzoe, explicitly claimed the mantle of ‘new biography’. This drew him to look not only at the construction of self, but also at how constructions of self are contested and historically contingent. Tzatzoe lived on the 19^th-century Cape-Xhosa frontier which offered ‘an unprecedented number of possibilities from which Africans could create, or indeed invent, many possible selves’ (Levine 2011: 3). Yet for all Levine’s narrative craft, there remains a gap in his reconstruction of the view and voice of Tzatzoe, who remains irretrievably distant. A person may well invent many selves, but only some are well preserved in the historical record.

Another strategy is to call into question inherited canons and their familiar concepts of genre. Hlonipha Mokoena’s discursive study Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (2011) is not a literary biography, even though Fuze was a writer. It is not even a biography in the normal sense of the term; we learn he had a daughter and that she was murdered by her husband only in the last chapter. Fuze’s archive was evidently thin on personal materials, but Mokoena’s strategy is not to redeem a story from what exists. Rather, she seeks to explore the interface between a writer, his intellectual influences and his readerships. Fuze himself worked with biography, writing a series of newspaper articles about his mentor and later collaborator Bishop John Colenso. Mokoena explicitly questions what it means for a self-conscious Zulu intellectual to work in that ‘typically European, enlightenment genre’ (Mokoena 2011: 66). This post-colonial analysis of a withered legacy refuses to package the life of a Zulu intellectual into a fragmented narrative based on the universalist presumptions of European modernity. Mokoena’s book on Fuze is significant among biographies for refusing to be one.

Paul Landau’s article in this Special Issue deals with two figures for whom there is an overabundance of information, Nelson Mandela and Ruth First, but he resembles Mokoena in his disinclination to shape their lives into a conventional narrative form. Rather, he lingers on discordant incidents, events or character revelations. While other scholars have mentioned violence in the first marriage of Mandela (Smith 2010), Landau uncovered a document to this effect signed by Mandela himself, acknowledging his abusive behaviour. What are the ethics of a foreign and white historian publishing this incontrovertible evidence of domestic violence in the Mandela household? His account of discordance in the life history of Ruth First is more circumstantial, but equally provocative. Landau presents strong inferential evidence to show that First was, for a time, the leader of the anti-apartheid struggle, but that she remained silent about this position. As a white woman, she was loath to claim leadership of what was an emphatically African and male-dominated movement. Landau lays out how central she was. These intensely awkward biographical ‘moments’ demonstrate for Landau the ultimate unfeasibility of imposing a retrospective moral consistency between author, subject, and readership.

Opening the awkward space

When questions about construction and authority shook the historical discipline in the 1990s, a trio of eminent historians at the University of California, Los Angeles, provided guidance. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, advocated a ‘practical realism’ that has a lot in common with the ‘pragmatic realism’ that Hyslop defends in his exchange with Rassool about South African biography (Hyslop 2010). Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob described this good-enough approach as positively awkward: ‘Workable truths appear as the result of messy, ideologically motivated, self-absorbed interventions undertaken by myopic people whose identities may be vastly different and distant from one’s own’ (Appleby, et al 1994: 192). We take this as a call to awkwardness.

The articles in this Special Issue experiment with the idea that a worthy life and an instructive story need not – in fact cannot – be innocent of awkwardness. Rather than seeing these difficulties as failings, we attempt to reframe missed connections in both the life and story as productive dissonance. Avoiding denial of the dark matter and dark energy in the different biographical constellations, we invite our readers to accept their hidden force, and embrace both the awkward storylines and the messy relationships between historians and their subjects and sources. When a biography falls short on the necessary evidence, empathy, critical distance, insight, or endorsements, what if we stay with the trouble, believing that a space of discomfort is also an incubation space for understanding? Observing without judging may not always be possible as a biographical technique, but it is possible to cushion the judgement by widening the field of observation.

We close with the admission that engaging with awkwardness may not be easy. Even if a biographer takes as her starting point that a life was both dominated by western knowledge-producing institutions and the scene of compromises and mistakes, obligations to the subject may curtail the author’s voice (Elliott 2018). Even if awkwardness is inevitable, we know it is hard to face. There are still reasons to minimise the awkward: admitting it may seem to weaken the evidence, the analysis, and the author’s authority. Too much attention to awkwardness can seem self-indulgent. Even if an author reflects on the misalignment between their conclusions and audience or subject expectations, biographical writing can prompt aggression. Authors might receive threatening phone calls or hate mail based on conflictual relationships with subjects (following LJ Bank & A Bank 2013), or even anonymous death threats (Vahed 2016).

We also recognise that embracing awkwardness does not justify telling all things. The awkward space does not provide a licence for prurience.¹⁰ Some aspects of the subject’s life and even the writing process might call for discretion. A biographer may be a confidence woman, but she need not be a hack. If intimate disclosures do not add to understanding the subject’s context or challenge broadly held understandings of the person, they are probably not necessary. If the biographer shares no cost for painful disclosures in the work, she should reconsider her motivations.

Notes

1 For critique and encouragement, we thank Joel Cabrita, Henry Dee, Shireen Hassim, Meghan Healy-Clancy, Paul Landau, Rob Morrell, Allison Shutt, Lynn Thomas, Cherryl Walker & Diana Wylie. We also thank Nicola Cloete and Di Stuart for seeing this issue of African Studies through to production.

2 Our survey is of English-language books published by the elite trade press and academic publications. The statistics here rest on the database of the full electronic record of all book-length biographies and autobiographies listed on SACat (South African Union Catalogue). Our calculations are confined to biographies and autobiographies about South Africans published in the 1990–2017 period. We include only first editions and exclude self-published books. We are grateful to Sue Ogterop for her arduous background work in compiling and collating this extensive database via the online SABINET platform.

3 For evidence of the breadth of life history in Zimbabwe, see ‘Autobiographies and Biographies’ <readingzimbabwe.com>.

4 We exclude from our analysis the several hundred professional biographies that explore lives within a narrowly defined career path. Subjects include sporting heroes, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, journalists, photographers, artists, musicians, actors, and directors.

5 Meghan Healy-Clancy has insightfully suggested that women dominate in collective biographies, which do not appear in our keyword survey. Women are also the author-subjects of 30 per cent of post-apartheid autobiographies.

6 Book lists for the first half of 2018 include several new biographies of Mandela in the centenary year of his birth, as well as biographies of Cyril Ramaphosa and Albert Luthuli.

7 We thank Paul Landau for this observation.

8 The market in biographies of apartheid prime ministers and Afrikaner political leaders is of course mainly an Afrikaans language market. Biographies of Afrikaner politicians have flourished almost unabated in the post-apartheid decades.

9 In post-apartheid autobiography, by contrast, 55 per cent of author-subjects have been black South Africans, highlighting the particular ethical awkwardness that we associate with biography. Statistics calculated from SACat database for 1990–2017 referenced in note 2.

10 We thank Allison Shutt for this observation.