A confessional mode dominated white South African autobiography in English in the 1990s; this followed the emphasis on bearing witness in black writing of the previous two decades. More recently, confession has entered black writing too. In Afrikaans writing, the modes of apologia (a defence of individual beliefs and actions) and auto-ethnography (a form of life-writing that relates the personal to the broader cultural and sociopolitical context) are still generally favoured. Since 1994, writing in English by black and white has presented a continuing desire to speak truthfully about the impact of power relations on selfhood (as confession met witness-bearing), but self-reflection has become less anguished in the context of a vision of nation building for which the new constitution and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) were the public faces. Although nearly all the political parties and many communities in South Africa have subsequently withheld complete support from the TRC's procedures (Johnson, SA's Brave New World, pp. 272–93) and findings, hopeful interactions between a newly inclusive vision and autobiography are evident and individual stories continue to reflect and perhaps shape the macrohistory.

Before discussing particular post-1994 autobiographies, this chapter will indicate some of the earlier, but comparably symbiotic, relationships between life-writing and the elements of the national imaginary that can be traced across South African history. Then it will take up the suggestion that in the past fifteen years of potentially inclusive democracy there is emerging a more open, less guilt-ridden mode of confessional writing, in which, particularly in the case of black writers, the representation of selfhood raises fresh questions about community.