The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

constituting three‐quarters of a page for his political profile published in Volume 4. 13
This profile provided a conventional biographic narration of Tabata’s political career
as “a founder and leading theoretician of the Non‐European Unity Movement”. It
focused on his birth and early education in the Eastern Cape, followed by his
political education and early political activity in Cape Town. It concentrated on
organisations that he helped establish or build (AAC, Anti‐CAD, NEUM, APDUSA),
and policies that he pursued, such as his preference for a “peasant‐based liberation
movement and a long‐range strategy of political education rather than short‐range
action campaigns”. It also provided a brief discussion of key political writings by
Tabata and ended with a discussion of his activities and continued writings after he
went into exile in 1963. It is this biographical document that went on to form the
main source on Tabata’s political career for subsequent researchers, who mined the
volume for facts on leaders’ lives. 14 It was not clear from the face of this published
volume or its bibliographical note what the origins or genealogy were of Tabata’s
profile.
Some of the clues for the answers to these questions about the origins and genealogy
of Tabata’s biographical profile were present in the more extensive ‐ but far less
consulted ‐ Carter‐Karis microfilm collection. In addition to a number of addresses,
speeches and writings authored under Tabata’s name between 1945 and 1965, 15 the
Africa, by I.B. Tabata, December 20, 1951’ (Document 98), in Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter
(eds), From Protest to Challenge, Volume 2, pp 340, 362, 506.
13 Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (eds), From Protest to Challenge, Volume 4, p 150.
14 It is interesting that Carter and Karis’s brief mention of Tabata having been employed as a truck
driver in Cape Town and having become a leading member of the Lorry Drivers’ Union were
among the innocuous facts retrieved and repeated by subsequent scholars such as Catherine
Higgs, Allison Drew and Linda Chisholm, who made uncritical use of Carter and Karis’ profile of
Tabata. See Catherine Higgs, the Ghost of Equality, Ch 5, fn 13, p 231; Allison Drew (ed), South
Africaʹs Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume 1, p 193, fn 34; Volume 2, p 156, fn 12;
Linda Chisholm, ‘Education, Politics and Organisation: The Educational Traditions and Legacies
of the Non‐European Unity Movement, 1943‐1986’, Transformation, 15, 1991, p 22. See also Colin
Bundy, ‘Resistance in the Reserves: the AAC and the Transkei’, Africa Perspective, No 22, 1983, p 52,
which drew partly on Carter and Karis’s profile of Tabata.
15 For example, ‘“The rehabilitation scheme: a new fraud.” Non‐European Unity Movement’ (Carter‐
Karis Microfilm Collection, 2:DA13: 84/5); ‘“The problem of organisational unity in South Africa”
By I.B. Tabata. Lusaka: All African Convention Unity Movement, 1948’ (sic) (2:DA13:84/6);
‘“Education for barbarism: Bantu education in South Africa.” By I.B. Tabata. Durban: Prometheus
300