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THE WAS, THE IS AND THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN: POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

APARTHEID-ERA political biography or autobiography has mostly depicted a drab troop of doughty Dutchmen or a skinny squad of well-intentioned English liberals, all doing their individual best to rescue the country from a mess of one kind or another. Since the 1990s, the post-apartheid genre, much influenced by the vindicatory mood of a successful liberation struggle, has been producing memoirs and personal assessments of what by now amounts to a battalion-size roll of resistance personalities. Taken together, these writings are not necessarily easily categorized or characterized. A great many of the life stories are neither fully personal memoir, nor completely biography, nor reliable history, although they may contain elements of all three. Most of the ‘comrade in the struggle’ autobiographies of the past decade or so are, predictably enough, narrow activist tracts which tell us how individuals operated in exile and what they did once they got back to life at the head of their country’s struggling anti-apartheid masses. Nearly all of these works are polemical or politically partisan to a greater or lesser degree. And it goes more or less without saying that most resistance life histories have focused on the great and the good within the ANC fold. Some of the books within this corpus of heroic autobiography and biography are richly informative as well as deeply moving, providing unforgettable pictures of the courage, the energy and the indomitable spirit of protagonists who never wavered in the lengthy, bitter and costly battle with the apartheid enemy. These include works such as the vivid story of the no-nonsense Communist labour organizer and feminist, Ray Alexander, a major figure in South African resistance history from the 1930s until her recent death.1 Other stories are so fearsomely brave and self-regarding that they hover on the edge of being faintly ludicrous,