It is to compare how the musicians' narratives differ from those of the national biographies. Chapter One introduces this first motif in the study, which determines the shape of the thesis as a whole. Autobiographies written in the first person, such as those of the musicians, encourage a merging of these distinctions.
I use the concept of the chronotope to reveal the heterogeneous times and spaces that musicians occupy differently in relation to the time and space of South Africa. I argue that the moment of exile introduces a chronotopic dislocation, as musicians are officially cut off from the chronological time of national biography in the act of exile. Similar tensions emerge between apartheid national biography and national biography as a narrative of "struggle."
They achieve this by offering counter-narratives that challenge apartheid's territorial claims, underpinned by the narrative of 'the Struggle'. The poetics of the musicians' topographical imagination and their limits are the subject of chapter three.
Narrating the Story of Departure
The secret of the departure is summed up by the central sentence ("Anything can happen"). This politicization contrasts with the figure of Masekela in the rest of 'home'. Tensions abound in the narrative of departure, oscillating randomly between the use of music as a reason for departure and the use of national biography.
Chronological biographical time in the form of the adventure story is a connecting figure that connects the musicians' stories with those of South Africa. It can even be said that the kind of temporality of the national biography prepares the kind of time in the autobiographies (Morson and Emerson 1990, 422). The second is evident from the encounter between the chronotope of the national biography and that of the musicians after departure.
Finally, the turning point can also be seen as an opportunity to withdraw from the undesirable chronotope of national biography. Such use of national biography diminishes the importance of Masekela's agency in the decision against return at this time. So Mogotsi, by moving away from national biography, also moves away from the adventure narrative of the great escape.
The inability to refer to national biography as a referent (however problematic) in the narrative of the moment of exile shows the process of exclusion at work in the narratives.
Topographies from/of Absence: Re-membering South Africa
They are already marginalized and their place in the socio-economic landscape is predetermined by the country's political structures. In the 1600s, the Dutch came to our beautiful maritime shores at the southern tip of the great African continent. As readers, we do not need to believe any of the current accounts of the myth of the beginnings of 'South Africa'.
This landscape was shaped by the space of 'South Africa' as land and as landed property. In other words, the existence of the grammatical 'I' in the narrative can only be affirmed relationally as a common (albeit individualized) '1'. It is a point that seems to be beyond the scope of national biography (Nuttall and Michael 2000, 301).
The story of the townships, on the other hand, points to an interrupted future, which the national biography endorses as 'the Struggle'. It is therefore significant that the icons who populate the story of 'The Struggle' and the musicians were outside South Africa. This function of the icons as a link is clearly evident in the musicians' story about the moment when return is permitted.
The return to the 'South African' space is imagined as a return to a 'South Africa' before the repression of the 1960s and the 1960s. Both counter-narratives rely on, and gravitate towards, national biography as a narrative of 'War'. However, the increased attention to the narrative of the 1970s and 1980s in autobiography tells a different story.
I met one or two of the old gangsters, from the Msomi gang and the Americans. Here we see that the South African era is changing the musicians' perception of the country's topography. The actual return is marked by the acknowledged failure of the idealized return, which accompanied the triumph of national biography as 'the Struggle'.
His retribution was realized by the processes of national biography that allowed the exiles to return from 1990. The security of home regained in return is another journey in musicians' lives—one that should be constructed outside of chronological biographical time. national biographies.
The Biographical Illusion: Representations and/as Representatives
We will call this democratization biographical illusion24 and deal with how it is established in autobiographies: with subjects, with other voices, and with the collaborative construction of national biography. Instead, they are relegated to the position of protagonists within a larger complex and are used to authenticate national biography as a narrative of “struggle”. Hall fails at the book's marketing strategies, while Makeba, the more famous partner, gets the top billing.
The authenticity - or rather, the authentic voice of the book - lies in the phrase 'her words'. Although these biographical tendencies are strong in the text, the desire for autobiography is also evident at the level of narrative discourse. Finally, I consider the possible consequences of this mode of representation in the writing and reading of national and musician biography.
Makeba 1988 transcribes songs that serve in different ways as commentary on the described situation of the national biography and the personal narrative. The former state president, FW De Klerk occupies an ambivalent position in the moral dynamics of the film. The selectivity of the narrative is obscured by one simple word quoted in the flirb above: "like".
This makes South African stories about the past and the tellers of those stories subject to teleology. Put simply, musicians' identities acquire meaning in national biography as figures of metonymy, which Michael Titlestad has elsewhere explained as a kind of 'cultural shorthand' (2004). In other words, the very names of musicians have become a sufficient marker of the type of musician, hero of struggle and exile preferred by national biography.
They cannot therefore be taken to simply fit into the narrated chronotopes of national biography. This, in tum, and as we have noted throughout, leads to a complete disregard of the intricacies involved in the stories of music's liberating potential. They strategically use both forms of the national biography as South Africa's "ground[s] of assumed value" (Parke 2002, l08) to construct narratives that perpetuate their seemingly marginal status.
The ethics of identification with the national biography as a narrative of the liberation struggle may initially seem a healthy, even 'natural' position for the musicians to take. Moreover, the narrative of 'the struggle' is no less reductive, territorial or simplistic than that of apartheid.
Conclusion
By persistently preserving the dialogical interweaving of chronotopes in the texts, I have sought to write against this form of exile as well. How, in the concretization of themes, motives and ideologies in autobiography and national biography, they make certain actions possible and others not. This would initiate a powerfully open dialogue that would radically relativize national biography and create spaces within which meaning-making processes would be possible and possible for those whose stories remain ignored in the current biography of the nation. .
34; History Narratives: Reimagining the Past in the Post-Apartheid Narrative "In Negotiating the Past: Making Memory in South Africa. 34; Cracked Heirlooms: Memory on Exhibition" In Negotiating the Past: Making Memory in South Africa. 34; Route Work: The Black Atlantic and the Politics of Exile” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons.
34;Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa." In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Memory and Democracy in South African Autobiography from In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa.
