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Unzima lomthwalo — ‘this load is heavy’: a selection of South African prison and exile life writings

Abstract Throughout the period of oppressive rule in South Africa, the struggle for freedom went hand in hand with identification politics. Individuals made decisions to identify with the larger struggle for freedom. The life writings discussed in this essay illustrate the myriad routes by which identity formation and identification were part of the larger struggle for a democratic and free South Africa. This form of identification allowed for the protagonists to accept redemptive suffering as a necessary part of their emancipation. While some theoreticians of life writing may assume a clear delineation between autobiographies that are a chronological account of verifiable facts and those that trace the development of an author's personality, this article discounts such binaries as misleading. It argues that the basis underpinning such descriptors should be stretched to include the kinds of choices that make both development of a personality and the recording of ‘verifiable facts’ an intricate part of identity formation as exemplified by these life writings.