Conventional wisdom has it that South Africa is blessed with stories. In the last years of apartheid, and the country’s first half-decade of freedom, ‘Tell our stories†was the cry, mantra and clarion call.
Since the turn of the century, politicians, biographers, ghostwriters and authors have been doing just that.
Autobiography, biography, memoir, family history, life-story-as-told-to, celebrity self-justification and corporate narcissistic rationalisation: life-writing is alive, and sometimes well, in South Africa.
Politicians, sportsmen and sportswomen, and so-called captains of industry have waded in, telling not all but rather just barely enough. When biographer replaces autobiographer, the resultant life remains impressionistic.
This type of sketchiness is typical of much local autobiography in the decade leading up to 2010. It stems partly from the nature of the genre: in writing about yourself, access to the subject/protagonist is both unlimited and self-selecting. Such control often leads to the self-consciously elusive, and a rash of self-protective denial. Biographers, as an inevitable occupational hazard, must try to breach the selfsame defences.
Nowhere was this more vividly evident than in Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred by Mark Gevisser (Jonathan Ball, 2007). Access counted heavily with Gevisser, to the detriment of a more sentient weighting of increasing evidence of Mbeki’s autocratic machinations.
Gevisser was granted pitifully brief ‘face time†with his subject and was later accused of being gullible and naive about Mbeki’s actions, policies and motives. Post-Polokwane ‘revelations†about Mbeki — in reality confirmation of widely held popular wisdom — powerfully have vindicated those criticisms.
Politicians are never easy subjects. Take the fierce resistance that Cyril Ramaphosa put up to Anthony Butler’s biography, Ramaphosa (Jacana, 2007) — a reaction that terrified Butler and about which he writes at some length in the preface.
Threats of another sort reside in the clerical life. The national weakness for making hagiographies from so-called big lives seems a natural pitfall here. Allan Boesak on yet another comeback wallows in self-absolution in Running with Horses (Joho! Publishers, 2009), which reads even worse after his self-serving fling with the Congress of the People.
Neither saintliness nor absolution motivates the subjects of two archbishops’ biographies, Desmond Tutu and Denis Hurley. Rabble-Rouser for Peace: The Authorised Biography of Desmond Tutu by John Allen (Rider, 2007) is extremely dutiful.
Allen was Tutu’s spokesperson and so had historical as well as contemporary access to his subject. Nonetheless, what resides in the details here is not the devil, but dullness, and what should have been compelling is merely comprehensive.
Also very detailed is Guardian of the Light, subtitled Denis Hurley: Renewing the Church, Opposing Apartheid, by Paddy Kearney (UKZN Press, 2009). But there is far more spark here than in the Tutu book, perhaps because Kearney is more removed from his subject than is Allen.
There can be a tendency for authorial reserve to diminish in other areas of political life-writing. Ventriloquist and style counsel rather than spectral scribe, Tim Couzens has been an indispensable aide to Ahmed Kathrada’s particular form of reminiscing — a type of memoir-ialising that memorialises.
That hoary handmaiden of the life tale, the professional writer ghosting along in the background, is also much in evidence beyond the political memoir sphere. Here, where money, popularity and celebrity do the talking, there are huge difficulties in reconciling the vanity and ego of the client-cum-subject with reality and history.
Wherever the cult of self, ventriloquists and backroom wordsmiths gather, the result most often is a hint of verisimilitude, a mere simulacrum of fact.
If history is written by the winners, a certain kind of life story is penned by wannabe winners — or those who believe they have triumphed.
A trusted ghostwriter or collaborator attached for matters of grammar, composition and basic style, former corporate captains set out to chart their lives.
Ever since Chrysler honcho Lee Iacocca sold the idea that the thoughts of a chairman other than Mao were of enduring importance, chairpeople, then managing directors, and latterly chief executives have been plying an unfamiliar trade.
There is nothing ambiguous about the title of Alan Knott-Craig’s business memoir, Second is Nothing (Macmillan, 2009). Ernest Hemingway, master of the declarative sentence, might have appreciated the brevity and the bravado of this title. He would have seen its hubris as well, and its predictable descent into bathos.
What Knott-Craig discovers — after two heart attacks and a capsized marriage — is that health and love are more important than rollicking success on the high seas of corporate buccaneering. We might be plunged into the ‘Information Age†and the time of the ‘Knowledge Economyâ€, but wisdom is notably absent. Nowadays, even fewer beings heed Socrates’s injunction of more than 2?400 years ago: ‘Know thyself.â€
Autobiography can be a process of discovery and disclosure. Biography should reveal and illumine. Memoir at the very least should delight. All those manifest in Emperor Can Wait: Memories and Recipes from Taiwan by Emma Chen (Picador Africa, 2009). I must declare at once that I am a friend of Emma’s.
But it would be dereliction of my duty as Mail & Guardian books editor not to list this memoir, which examines how food carries with it the impress, memory and power of the old country. In doing so it confirms that food makes mother-tongue speakers of us all.
From the first decade of the 21st century, Chris van Wyk’s memoir Shirley, Goodness & Mercy (Picador Africa, 2004) resonates most deeply. A wry, searching recollection of self, family and the coloured community of Riverlea, Johannesburg, it is the work of a dedicated writer and a humanist. He tells us more about South Africa than a shelf of vain and self-justifying tomes. Supremely, Van Wyk reminds us that the lives and actions of so-called ordinary people have as great an influence on history as those of the so-called great.
Top Ten: your decade in review
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