Secrets and Lives: South African Political Biography

Abstract

"...So much South African political biography is about secret things. Of course, political biography generally has long investigated intimate corners of private life. Since Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, even when the focus in biographical writing is on the 'social self' of public personalities, their choices and decisions have been generally recognised to be influenced by predispositions developed in settings well apart from the affairs of state. Such settings might include childhood, or friendships, or the institutions that nurture beliefs and faith. The notion that public lives are performative, and follow self-constructed scripts, supplies another reason for biographers to explore hidden interior lives. Gaps between public personality and private self can invest life history with tragic heroism, as well as, more prosaically, turning mythologised icons into accessible mortals...."