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The following interview with N. Chabani Manganyi explores his roles as a writer, theorist, and critic of biography. It focuses primarily on his two published biographies, Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es 'kin Mphahlele (1984) and A Black Man Called Sekoto (1996), as well as on his essays on auto/biography.
Thengani Ngwenya (TN): You have written two biographies, and theoretical essays on auto/biography, but your formal training is in Clinical Psychology. Would you like to comment on how that background influences the way you conceive of the process of the biographical reconstruction of people's lives?
Chabani Manganyi (CM): Well, I think in my case the interest in life writing was in important respects related to the fact that I am a clinical psychologist by training, but in addition to that, a socially aware clinical psychologist who had been struggling intellectually with understanding the conditions under which we lived in South Africa before 1994, and wanting to use my academic and professional training to deepen that understanding and to find ways of answering certain important questions of the time. It's also the case that I happened in the 1970s to be in an environment in which both the professional discourse and the academic discussions that were going on had a strong social bias. You must remember that the early 70s in the US, which is where I was at that time, came after a period of considerable social upheaval.
TN: In one of your essays on psychobiography entitled "Psychobiography and the Truth of the Subject, "you mention that biographers must seek their own truth while simultaneously seeking the truth about their subjects. I take this to mean that as a biographer while writing about somebody else's life you are at the same time writing about yourself.
CM: Well, I'm certain that the intention and the meaning ofthat statement is not that one writes about oneself. The psychological meaning ofthat statement-I think it comes from a kind of practice that is demonstrated in the work of Erik Erikson, which is to say that you have to, as Jean Paul Sartre once put it, overcome your own prejudices, you must write against yourself -trying to understand and overcome your own prejudices. What I was trying to...