Ntongela Masilela’s Insidious Historico-Biographical Method: An Uneasy Balance Enabling the Re-reading of Memoir and Contemporary History

Abstract

ABSTRACT Whereas the intellectual labour of re-memorialising what has come to be understood as the “living archive of Ntongela Masilela” hinges on the broad corpus that he churned out as he steadily carved out the contours of the New African Movement, we hereby submit that there is at base an historico-biographical method from which analysis of contemporary memoirs continue to benefit. We aver here that this train of thought was already methodically signposted by Masilela in a series of his writings over the decades which in essence is the central organising motif of his archival work. Using this method, we are able to critique some of the recent writings which either employed Masilela’s (our own inference) method and those with fractures as a consequence of the failure of the historico-biographical method to the extent that these emerge as pop literature created along the same inclinations as pop culture (read music) which come as goes.