The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

This milieu of socialist politics, resistance strategies and national liberation
constructed by Drew included a focus on I.B. Tabata, whom she described as one of
the socialist movement’s “principal figures”. 21 Apart from her research in the Karis
and Carter volumes and microfilms, and in other collections, Drew had also gone to
Harare to interview Tabata and his companion, Jane Gool, in December 1987.
Drawing on Dora Taylor’s biographical writings about Tabata, as found in these
collections, and on this interview, Drew reconstructed Tabata’s biography. He had
been the “most prominent African member and leading organiser” of the Trotskyist
Workers’ Party of South Africa, who had been “born near the farming community of
Queenstown” and who “made yearly trips to the Transkei in the late 1940s and early
’50s”. 22 In the 1940s, as a member of the WPSA, Tabata had been one of the “group of
radicals” who “[had taken] over the leadership of the AAC”, and had argued for “a
boycott of all racial structures proposed by the government”. Tabata was also “a
founder of the NEUM”. After having been banned in 1956, Tabata “established and
became president of APDUSA”. 23
Tabata and the Workers’ Party focused on the “land question”, which for them “was
the heart of South Africa’s social struggle”. Tabata believed that “Africans were
predominantly a landless peasantry which could be mobilised for social revolution
on the issue of land hunger”. Drew drew upon her interview with Tabata (with
Gool), to make the argument that the Workers’ Party had long ago realised that
migrant labour could easily be used against urban worker strikes if the reserves
remained unorganised. Therefore for them, migrant labour formed “the mediating
link between urban and reserve‐based struggles”. 24 Elsewhere, Drew entered into
debate with Tabata over his analysis of the “dual consciousness” of migrant workers
21 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism, 1928‐1960’, p 8.
22 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism, 1928‐1960’, p 463. Here, the
biographical tract produced by Dora Taylor under the name Nosipho Majeke in 1965, ‘I.B. Tabata,
President of the Unity Movement of South Africa for full democratic rights’, which Drew
consulted at Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library, was treated as an unmediated
source, and simply mined for facts on Tabata’s life.
23 Allison Drew, South Africa’s Radical Tradition, Volume Two, p 156.
24 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism, 1928‐1960’, pp 463‐465.
304