The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

INTRODUCTION
The research for this dissertation started off as an exercise in political history. Amid a
resurgence of South African political biography both inside and outside the academy in
the 1990s, this study set out to research Isaac Bangani Tabata’s life as an exercise in
political biography and resistance history. In its original conception, it aimed to recover
I.B. Tabata as a means of addressing serious shortcomings in a historiography of
resistance that had paid little attention to the Unity Movement. Tabata had passed away
shortly before the project began, and the main research challenges seemed to be largely
empirical and logistical. The early 1990s was a time of political change. Political
movements were unbanned. Exiles were starting to return. In some quarters, South
African resistance history was beginning to take on a triumphal tone of political victory
and rebirth in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom at Victor Verster prison in
1990. This also marked a further moment in which historical research was framed as the
recovery of hidden or neglected pasts, as researchers created gaps in order to fill them.
In the early to mid‐1990s, these histories of resistance began to be connected to a longer
narrative of reconciliation and reconstruction.
While it seemed difficult to connect the trajectory of Tabata’s life into a liberation
movement’s triumphal narrative, or to an extended history of reconciliation, I could
certainly attempt to fill Tabata’s historiographical gap with a chronological account of
his political life. It seemed possible to benefit from research opportunities that the period
of return and negotiation had opened up. Indeed, it seemed that the logistical problems
of gaining access to archives of liberation movements in general, and to sources and
archives associated with Tabata and the Unity Movement in particular were fast easing.
It might even be possible to have access to Tabata’s political colleagues who would be
able to impart their memories and assessments. Moreover, in the case of I.B. Tabata, it
helped that an archival collection in his name and that of his movement had just been
installed at the University of Cape Town as part of the general process of ‘return’.
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