Remembering Chris Hani: Biography, agency, and political life today

Abstract

This article is based on research carried out for the author’s PhD dissertation, which focused on the contested ways in which Martin Thembisile ‘Chris’ Hani is remembered and memorialised (in biographies, museums, exhibitions, film, and the public domain more generally), and what these invocations tell us about processes of historical production, the transitional period from apartheid to democracy, and what it means to live on in the wake of apartheid and colonialism. This article takes up some of these debates in an abridged form, focusing on processes of biographical production, the individual and experience, and what can be seen as a tension between romantic and tragic modes of narrative emplotment. Throughout Longford attempts to problematise individualist ideas about freedom, modernity, and agency, and offers alternative routes through which to understand historical change, political struggle, and subjectivity, as well as biographical and historical production as a conflicted and contested terrain.