Pippa Green on the Art Biography

by Phakama on Dec 3rd, 2008

The Art of Biography Writing – Trevor Manuel opens his heart

By Pippa Green

“When I first approached Manuel with the idea of writing a biography on him – back in 2002 – he was not averse to the idea. Neither did he bubble with enthusiasm.”

“I also realise how little we still know about each other and the personal pain so many suffered. The present often suffocates the past.”

English writer Somerset Maugham once said there are three rules about writing biographies – unfortunately nobody knows what they are. That can be nowhere more true than if the subject is a living person still making history. And most of the new spate of biographies in South Africa are about very much alive people because we are stage in our history where we are beginning to reflect on the foundations of our democracy.

Part of that is a reflection on the leaders who helped bring it into being. First we had the books on the first generation – Nelson Mandela, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Oliver Tambo. In the past two years, we have seen the stories of the second generation of political leaders explained. So we have had a substantial biography on Thabo Mbeki by Mark Gevisser (there have been others but for the most part, whether they are hostile or friendly, have been vehicles used to express the authors’ own political opinions), one on Cyril Ramaphosa (a reluctant subject), an authorised (and the most comprehensive) biography of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and a biography/autobiography on Mac Maharaj that elucidates the political battles inside the ANC like few others have done.

It seems entirely right that this reflection is taking place now, as that generation grows old. But biographies of politicians, interesting as they may turn out to be, are especially difficult at a time in South Africa when the political jostling for power is so great. What should be a work on history is sometimes seen as a political intervention.

It’s a pity really because we are constrained by today in recording the stories of yesterday for tomorrow. The rich and interesting narratives of the lives of South Africans are difficult to tell because they may disturb the political exigencies of the moment.

The best writers of biography have managed to transcend, but not ignore, the present. Gevisser’s biography of Mbeki does this in an emphatic and empathetic way. We understand the man who became President – his strengths and weaknesses – and the history that shaped him, because Gevisser looked beyond today, both past and forward, to tell his story.

So how and why do biographers choose their subjects? I began work on this project nearly three years ago, but it had been on my mind at least three years before that. Partly it is to do with the age we have reached as a country. It is more than a decade after our democracy was established and we are beginning to tell the stories of the “founding parents” (although most are still the “founding fathers”).

But there is a much more specific reason in my interest in Manuel. I had come of age, back to back with him as it were, in the same city and the same political milieu. But our paths to that point were decidedly different. When I first became aware of him, I was a university student, brought up in a middle-class (though, not rich – my parents were both journalists) household with all the attendant advantages that went with being white in a discriminatory society. He was a trainee civil engineer on a construction site by day and a political activist at night. He had been brought up in a working class household, had suffered through the relatively early death of his father. His mother, a garment worker, had had to make significant sacrifices to give her children, at the very least, a good high school education. Both sides of his family – paternal and maternal – had been victim of the Group Areas Act. Both had lost their homes in old, established communities.

I didn’t know this back in the early 1980s. Then, when I became a newspaper reporter, and when he fell much more in my focus, he was a full-time civic organiser and activist. But he never wore his past as a large badge intended to evoke sympathy. Neither did he do so through long periods when he was either in hiding from police or in jail during the emergency. I recall once doing an interview with him in the house I lived in Cape Town. He had come dressed to look like a Muslim artisan – overalls and a skull cap – in an old battered bakkie. Somehow – I can’t recall how – I had arranged this secret rendezvous in the middle of the State of Emergency to interview him for an article I was writing about how the UDF had been affected by the clampdown. What I do remember is that it took a lot of nudging, on my part, to get him to speak about his own personal predicament.

After the ANC was unbanned, he rocketed to an important leadership position in the organisation, was appointed to Mandela’s first cabinet, and then became the first black Minister of Finance. Today he is the longest-serving finance minister in the world. He was one of those who took the debris of an economy that apartheid had left in its wake, shook it up, straightened it out.

Yes, there are still many failures, many shortcomings in what our country can deliver to its citizens, not least jobs. But we have been in the longest recorded phase of economic growth. And Manuel, it seemed, played a critical role in this.

Yet I was not sure that I really knew, or understood him. What made him able to grasp the historical circumstances he was dealt in life and, in turn, shape them to make new history? In a sense all biographies are duty-bound to try to answer this question, but it is one of the hardest to answer. We take so much for granted about the people we think we know.

When I first approached Manuel with the idea of writing a biography on him – back in 2002 – he was not averse to the idea. Neither did he bubble with enthusiasm. But as we engaged in initial dialogues that were more than conversations and less than interviews, he began to examine questions about himself and his own background that intrigued him.

And so in 2005, we began seriously: a structured series of interviews that followed, more or less, but not religiously, a chronological order. We had agreed that the biography should not be “authorised” but rather a “co-operative one”. There are certain implications to an authorised biography. For one thing, one needs access to far more written documentation than is possible when the “story” is still running. It is impossible to extract cabinet memos, for instance, from a serving cabinet minister. Also, I thought that Manuel was not yet old enough – his career is not yet done – for an authorised biography to be sufficiently authoritative. Thirdly, in our contentious country, authorised biographies of political leaders may seem more like an endorsement than a reflection and a narrative account. Lastly, an unauthorised biography allows the writer more distance and more independence. Sometimes we see significance in the things that the subjects don’t.

There is also always the tension in such an undertaking between how to balance personal details of a life, with the bigger political issues. It is critical to balance the two. The story of a human life is imminently personal. To deny this would be to write a book that no reader can relate to. But there are always the issues that are somehow bigger and beyond the personal: the grand narratives of transition in this country, for instance. A biography of a political leader is, by definition, more about the political changes they were part of than anything else. But to ignore the personal aspects of a life totally would make for a dry (and untruthful) read.

With Manuel, I was fortunate in many ways in my subject choice. For the first six months or so of my research, we would meet once every six weeks or so, for over an hour. I would ask questions and he would remember and reflect. Mostly, we would meet around the kitchen table in his house on the government estate in Pretoria, after hours, so there were few interruptions. Occasionally, we would meet in his offices where there are often interruptions and always time pressures. Later on we met less frequently but fairly regularly. Those interactions have allowed his voice to be central in my writing. And his voice, luckily, is more interesting than that of many politicians – it is robust and colourful at times, reflective at others.

For the writer of narrative non-fiction, where every fact and date has to be pinned down before the story can go forward, Manuel is a godsend. He has one of the sharpest memories I have come across. I have gone out to interview others in his life, and tried to cross-check dialogue and dates and places and a sequence of events. In almost every case his memory is astonishingly precise.

I have interviewed about seventy people for this project, several more than once, and that too has been a revelatory experience. I have found that when one asks people to reflect on their own journeys through life, and the way those journeys intersected with Manuel’s, they have engaged with the past in a way that at first I didn’t think possible in a country where it still impinges so directly on the present. Yet as friend and fellow-journalist, Marianne Thamm, remarked to me, many of our everyday conversations either deal with the immediately practical, or are pretty superficial. So when people get a chance to really reflect on the circumstances, both personal and historic, that have shaped their lives, they have grasped that opportunity.

I also realise how little we still know about each other and the personal pain so many suffered. The present often suffocates the past. Perhaps this is why we tell the stories of our past and of the people who have led us out of it. To try to capture the humanity in others, and so help us find our own.

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Pippa Green’s biography of Trevor Manuel – Choice, Not Fate – will be launched by Penguin next week.
This essay appeared in the second edition of Wordsetc in May 2008. Back copies are still available. To subscribe to this excellent literary journal please visit http://www.wordsetc.co.za/. It’s R170 for four copies.