The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

tribute to Tabata that Taylor constructed was the archival collection that entered the
University of Cape Town from 1989.
The final chapter examines the relations of paternalism and patronage which
characterised the Unity Movement’s political formations as they emerged in the 1940s
and 1950s. These formations, in some ways, resembled a family, but more so a school.
While schools have been enabling institutions, they have also been institutions of
discipline and constraint. This certainly was the case with the Unity Movement, whose
forums of knowledge formation were also structures of person formation. In this
educational structure, Tabata’s biography of leadership was narrated as historical
lesson, and as a model to be followed.
The contests and challenges over I.B. Tabata’s leadership that erupted in the movement
in South Africa in the 1950s and in Lusaka in the 1960s emerged out of these ambiguities
and contradictions. This chapter examines the internal dissent that gave rise to contests
of Tabata’s biography. Tabata’s biography had become a form of authority, turned into
lessons of leadership, and it was challenged for the modes of authoritarianism and
deception it represented. The chapter ends by studying the memory contests between
different factions of the Unity Movement that occurred on Tabata’s death and those that
unfolded at his funeral. Here, secular eulogies of Tabata’s life were made to
accommodate Christian narrations, as a severely weakened political movement was
unable to contain the narrative boundaries of Tabata’s biography.
The dissertation ends with a short postscript on historical practice and looks at my own
practice as a historian in the academy and the public domain. Based on my experience in
a range of sites in which histories and biographies have been produced, I go on to make
a case for methodological and theoretical attention to be given to the construction of
lives and to the study of relations and conditions of production as a means by which
biography can be marshalled to create a domain of critical citizenship. Herein, I suggest,
lie some of history’s possibilities of transcending modernism.
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