The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

transformation in the Eastern Cape? It seemed possible to establish a coherence and
systematic sense of Tabata’s political thought, and to trace its germination, development
and maturation. All that was needed was access to the appropriate archives and sources,
which had been previously neglected or out of bounds.
I suspected that the answers lay in the Trotskyist formations in Cape Town in the 1930s
and 1940s, especially in the Worker’s Party of South Africa and its public debating
forum, the Spartacus Club, with which Tabata had been associated. Answers also
seemingly lay in his association with his fellow Trotskyists, Jane and Goolam Gool. I had
just taken the initiative to facilitate the acquisition of a portion of the WPSA archive for
the Mayibuye Centre at UWC, and had access to another portion of the archive that was
in other hands. It seemed that many of the answers to questions about origins and
causation, and the ‘making’ of I.B. Tabata, were going to be found in his covert
Trotskyist political engagement. The WPSA archive would provide documentary
evidence of hidden Trotskyist agency and this could be supplemented by interviews
with Tabata’s comrades.
Other scholars were working in the same field, and there was some communication
amongst us. I corresponded and met with Baruch Hirson and Allison Drew, both of
whom had done substantial documentary collection and writing on South African
Trotskyism. We shared our insights with each other, as well as our knowledge of the
sources. Both Hirson and Drew were doing biographical research as part of the broad
project of uncovering as much as possible about the history of South African Trotskyism,
including the politics of the Unity Movement and its activists such as Tabata. There was
no need to compete with each other in the empirical field of South African Trotskyist
and Unity Movement history. After all, I had defined my topic in biographical ways
around Tabata. During the 1990s, both Hirson and Drew kept in touch with me, keen to
discover the outcome of my research. What new facts and insights about Tabata’s life
had I discovered? One major publication on South African Trotskyism, which Hirson
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