Lauren Segal

This book sets out to commemorate the extraordinary people and events that marked South Africa in the 20th Century: engagingly written, impeccably researched and excellently illustrated, Great Lives deserves a place in every library.

The collection of 24 personality-driven prose snapshots brings history to life in a unique manner: although both writers are historians, this is no dry as dust text book. The writing is fresh and readable with a keen eye for the sort of detail that brings the past to life, without ever being sensationalist.

The aim was to produce a series of intimate portraits using the resources of the South African History Archives, in addition to many other specialist, academic and newspaper libraries from around the country.

Letters, official documents, pamphlets, advertisements, newspaper cuttings, police reports, inquest dockets, cartoons, poems, record sleeves, manuscripts and photographs complement the text perfectly.

Many of the names featured are unfamiliar because they were barely mentioned at the time and only recently have revisionist historians examined some of the people and events which have been ignored for decades.

The Bullhoek Massacre of 1921 for example, when an 800 strong police force shot dead at least 183 followers of the prophet Enoch Mgijima, founder of the Israelite Church, during a 20 minute battle because the church members were squatting illegally.

The sinking of the SS Mendi in 1917, in which 609 black South African troops were drowned, is even more poignant: the South African Native Labour Contingent was sent to Europe in the Great War to perform manual labour on the front lines – since the men were not allowed to be armed, these jobs were very dangerous.

A shipload of the volunteers was sailing on the Mendi when it was damaged in a collision with another ship, and the Reverend Isaac Wauchope emerged as a leader, calming the men as the ship sank. “You are going to die’ he told them, ‘but that is what you came here to do… Let us die like warriors, the sons of Africa.”

We are introduced to forgotten heroes and victims but today’s popular icons are not neglected – most notably the most famous soccer club in the land, Orlando Pirates.
“I think to Pirates fans it’s not soccer, it’s a religion. I firmly believe that once a Pirate, always a Pirate” said Ralph Hendricks of the team which was founded by a group of school boys in Orlando East, 1939.

Whites are not completely excluded from the book and one of the four who gets the nod of approval is the Afrikaans female poet Ingrid Jonker, to whom Nelson Mandela paid tribute in his 1994 inaugural parliamentary address:

“She was both a poet and a South African. She was both an Afrikaner and an African. She was both an artist and a human being. In the midst of despair she celebrated hope. Confronted by death, she asserted the beauty of life.”

Linking these disparate biographies into a cohesive whole is a series of timelines, one at the start of every period: the five timelines form a concrete continuum through the chapters, contextualizing the personal portraits not only in South African history but, to a lesser extent, world history as a whole.

Great Lives was motivated and financed by the behemoth Sunday Times, as part of their Centenary celebration offshoot Heritage Project in which, under the direction of legendary journalist Charlotte Bauer, the paper attempted to create a lasting legacy in the form of strategically placed art works.

Local artists devised and created monuments celebrating the people and events that made the news over the last century: these memorials were strategically positioned in places felt to be most representative of their subjects – Basil D’Oliviera for example is at Newlands, while Brenda Fassie is at Newtown.

My only complaints are that the photographs of the art works, which appear at the end of every chapter, are, by and large, abysmal; the pictures should have had captions and, as is becoming distressingly common, the index is an insult to the text, the subjects and the authors.

But on the whole Great Lives is riveting stuff, informative and inspiring, a new and pleasantly pictorial take on our history, much of which they never cared to teach us in pre-1994 South Africa.… (mer)