The publishers of each of these books claim a revelation of common experience and suffering through the true recounting of an individual life. Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself was first published anonymously in 1861. The dust-jacket of this new edition hails it both as a true life-story and as a classic expression of 'the Afro-American experience'. Edith Turner's The Spirit and the Drum, which recounts her visits to western Zambia with her husband Victor a century later than Jacobs's misadventures in America, is described as 'a highly personal memoir' which 're-creates the ritual and ceremonial life of the Ndembu people'. Mark Mathabane's autobiographical Kaffir Boy, which describes growing up in Alexandra township near Johannesburg between 1960 and 1978, is offered both as 'a unique and remarkable memoir' and as a revelation of 'how a black and his family suffer the daily reality' of the system of Apartheid. Yet each raises questions concerning their representativeness, their literalness and their significance.

LRB 9 July 1987 | PDF Download