The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

for the field of political biography in South Africa through opening up questions
about political lives as productions and about the place of narrative in the formation
of identity. These questions create the possibility of extending the field of South
African resistance history beyond the realist methodological boundaries of
chronological narrative and the recovery limits of documentary political history.
Tabata biographies and documentary history
Biographical narrations of I.B. Tabata’s political life have featured in the recovery
projects of documentary history in the collections of political documents and political
lives compiled by Gwendolen Carter and Tom Karis in the 1960s and 1970s. Tabata’s
political career was also a subject of some focus in the archival investigations and
political syntheses of American political scientist Allison Drew and socialist
intellectual Baruch Hirson, both of whom set out to recover and document the
political record of South African Marxist ‐ especially Trotskyist ‐ political formations,
thinkers and activists. As argued above, Carter and Karis’s documentary history of
the national movements, as a project of archiving and resistance historical narration,
served to set the terms, chronologies and codes through which black South African
resistance politics was understood for a long time. In its published form and in its
existence as an archive, the Karis and Carter project constructed an orthodox
narrative history of modern, rational and purposeful political formations, led by
equally modern, rational and purposeful leaders. Political history was constituted
out of the words and actions of political leaders of national political organisations,
and their political statements and biographic profiles stood as the authoritative –
almost monumental – sources of a significant political history. 11
While Volumes 2 and 3 of the Karis and Carter series published a range of political
materials authored by Tabata, 12 Tabata was also accorded two paragraphs
11 See Chapter Three.
12 For example, ‘Address by I.B. Tabata, AAC Conference, December 16, 1941’ (Document 62),
‘Letter [“On the Organisations of the African People”], from I.B. Tabata to Nelson Mandela’, June
16, 1948’ (Document 67) and ‘“Opening Address” at First Conference of the society of Young
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