ABSTRACT
Ronnie Kasrils was born in 1938 in Johannesburg into a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent. He was an operative of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) since its inception in 1961 and spent almost three decades in exile before returning to South Africa in 1990. He became a minister in governments presided by Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. Besides, Kasrils also made himself a name as the author of four memoirs published between 1993 and 2019. While his memoirs partly overlap in terms of content, they differ considerably in style and blur the already porous lines between autobiography and biography.
In this chapter Kasrils’s writing is explored, focusing on two memoirs that stand out given the way in which they interweave autobiographical and biographical elements. In The Unlikely Secret Agent, he tells the story of his first wife, Eleanor, in a way that has been characterized as crossing the border into fiction; in A Simple Man: Kasrils and the Zuma Enigma, Kasrils enquires into the events that led to the massive abuse of power by President Jacob Zuma (2009–2018), crossing the border into political history. By considering his writings from a comparative perspective, it becomes clear that he uses auto/biographical writing to intervene in established power relations, giving space to overlooked actors and reducing the space given to those already in the spotlight.
