The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

and reserve dwellers, arguing that this seeming “dual consciousness” was “actually a
refection of a highly differentiated reserve population with diverse aspirations”. 25
Drawing again on Taylor’s manuscript and her own interview with Tabata, Drew
referred to the importance of AAC activists in the first campaigns against the
Rehabilitation Scheme from 1946, to the impact of the distribution of Tabata’s 1945
pamphlet criticising the scheme, and to the strategic decision to advocate forms of
non‐collaboration to protest against Rehabilitation. Having been arrested in 1948 in
the Mount Ayliff region for incitement after having addressed a large crowd, Tabata,
she suggested, had argued for importance of mobilising people “on the basis of their
immediate needs and demands” and not in pursuance of “abstract goals like
nationalisation”, as other Trotskyists in Cape Town had been advocating. Tabata had
argued that the government already owned the reserves, and it had “merely
entrusted” these to Africans. This, Drew suggested led Tabata to query whether
activists should “allow the government to take the people’s cattle”. 26 By the late
1950s, according to Drew, the AAC found itself caught between rural pressures for
“more militant assistance” against Rehabilitation and pressures inside the WPSA and
NEUM for a more restrained, propagandistic approach to agitation. 27
In the face of this “rural pressure for militancy”, internal turmoil in the WPSA led to
the split in the NEUM, which, Tabata suggested was “mediated by personality
conflicts”. In Drew’s rendition of Tabata’s position, this internal conflict was
“between theoreticians who were not involved in the actual organisation of people
25 Allison Drew, ‘Theory and Practice of the Agrarian Question in South African Socialism, 1928‐
60’. Notwithstanding its presence in the bibliography of her dissertation and this article, it is
indeed remarkable that Drew failed to refer to Colin Bundy’s research on the AAC and the
Agrarian Question in her chapter on ‘The Unity Movement and the Land Question’. See Colin
Bundy, ‘Resistance in the Reserves: the AAC and the Transkei’, Africa Perspective, No 22, 1983, and
‘Land and Liberation: Popular Rural Protest and the National Liberation Movements in South
Africa, 1920‐1960’, in Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (eds), The Politics of Race, Class and
Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London and New York: Longman, 1987). The latter
article was first delivered in 1982 in New York at the conference on which the book was based.
26 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism, 1928‐1960’, pp 468‐9.
27 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism, 1928‐1960’, p 474.
305