The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Movement of SA and a Great Man”. The setting of the modest family cemetery made
the claims on leadership and greatness seem incongruous.
These varied sites and institutions at which I.B. Tabata’s life history was projected,
recovered and contested as political lesson, archival collection, museum display and
memorial resting place reflect differences in biographic impulse, narrative intent and
cultural economy. Indeed, at the turn of the 21st century, as Tabata was turned into a
deceased political teacher, elder statesman, and family ancestor, the narratives and
meanings of his life history were contested in a variety of ways between institutions
and sites. This suggests that there was a longer genealogy of biographical work and
biographical relations, through which Tabata was ‘produced’ in narrative terms
under different conditions. It also indicates a deeper layering of controversy and
contestation through which these productions were challenged. Here, we argue that
it is the order and sequence of these biographic productions, relations and contests
that need to be understood.
Part Two of this dissertation is about the history of the idea of Isaac Bangani Tabata
as a leader with a biography. It is concerned to understand a fuller range of
narrations of the life of this activist, intellectual and writer associated with the
Workers’ Party of South Africa (WPSA), the All African Convention (AAC), the Non‐
European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the African People’s Democratic Union of
Southern Africa (APDUSA). It is interested to analyse the social and political lives of
Isaac Bangani Tabata’s biographies and examine how these have been produced and
reproduced through and across quite varied mediums of history: through writing
and visualisation; in the political movement and in the academy; through the politics
of exile and in the domain of commemoration; through the creation and
institutionalisation of an archival collection, and in the museum setting of heritage
creation. My interest also lies in trying to comprehend the relations and conditions of
production of these biographies, the circumstances of their reproduction and
continued life, how they were put to work at different times, and the ways in which
they were contested and contradicted. This study tries to explore new possibilities
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