The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

and those engaged in practical grassroots activity”. Cape Town Trotskyists, on the
other hand, understood this split as brought on by the “growing tendency” in the
AAC to “interpret the land question in the narrow bourgeois sense of the right to buy
and sell”. In the cities, growing pressure for “greater involvement in urban
struggles” led to the formation of SOYA, the Society of Young Africa, in 1951, whose
affiliation to the AAC was, Drew suggests, an attempt on Tabata’s part “to increase
his social base through organisational leverage” in the WPSA and the NEUM. The
formation of APDUSA in 1961 by the Tabata faction was “an organisational response
to internal pressures for a militant working class approach”, and “address[ed] the
question of African leadership” that had been raised in the WPSA. In comparing
APDUSA to “yeast which makes the dough of the mass movement rise”, Tabata’s
view of the relation of APDUSA to the national movement “reflected Trotsky’s
influence”. 28
In reconstructing this internal history of the NEUM and Tabata’s political career,
Drew placed emphasis upon the agency of the WPSA and on Tabata’s membership
of and participation in this party as motivation for his interventions. This archival
recovery of a primary, but submerged, Trotskyist agency as the basis of
understanding the history of the NEUM, its component sections and the analyses of
its activists was not new. Drew’s work, which was first published in 1991, followed
in the footsteps of a longer genealogy of documentary research that had tried to
uncover Trotskyist initiative in shaping political formations and organisational
strategies of national liberation, and in directing political ideas and historical
analyses of the NEUM. 29
28 Allison Drew, ‘Social Mobilisation and Racial Capitalism, 1928‐1960’, pp 477‐505. Drew’s
argument that the formation of APDUSA as a unitary structure as well as its “non‐racial definition
of the African nation” had showed a “recognition of the criticisms of NEUM’s federal structure” (p
502) reflected a conflation of the federal structure with the NEUM’s three‐pillar structure and a
misunderstanding of the NEUM’s federalism. The federal organisational form of the NEUM did not
refer to the three racialised streams of political mobilisation and campaigning, as assumed by Drew,
but to the relationship between the NEUM, the AAC, and the Anti‐CAD and the myriad of
organisations of diverse kinds which were members of these structures.
29 See Tony Southall, ‘Marxist Theory in South Africa until 1940’, M.A. Thesis, University of York,
1978; Roy Gentle, ‘The NEUM in Historical Perspective’, B.Soc.Sci. Hons Thesis, University of
306