"... to Remember is Like Starting to See": South African Life Stories Today‪.‬

In Sources of the Self (1992), Charles Taylor states that one cannot be a self on one's own. The remark is reminiscent of the South African proverb, motho ke motho ka batho ba bang or umntu ngumntu ngabantu [a person is a person because of or by means of other people]. All autobiographies or 'life stories' are or contain family portraits and community stories; they exhibit the socially embedded nature of the author's life. Family, friends, enemies and officials feature alongside the author. Individual lives and events are shown to be profoundly affected by, and often parallel to, national histories. The autobiography is never only the author's story. Although this point would be difficult to prove in terms of hard evidence, South African autobiographers may be especially preoccupied with their 'South Africanness' because an inclusive national identity and citizenship were usurped for so long by--or at least, in the name of--an oppressive minority. Hence Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela writes of unexpectedly realising, upon returning to South Africa in June 1994, that she "could not have described [her]self as a South African" in her "past travels", whereas she thinks to herself (as the plane lands): "This is my country, my home" (2003: 6-7; original italicised). Similarly, Antjie Krog in entitling her work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Country of my Skull (1998) reflects the need to reinvent the country, but with an anguished sense of ownership that includes responsibility as much as hauntedness. The majority of those who write about living here could be described as having felt that we were the land's before the land was ours.