The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

In making these assessments, Hirson was careful to spell out that his relationship with
Tabata had gone back to the periods 1944‐45 and 1950‐57, when he worked in the
NEUM. It was Hirson who had set up the People’s Press in Johannesburg in 1950, and
used his old printing skills gained in the WIL (and the same typesetter and printer) to
enable Tabata’s book, The All African Convention: The Awakening of a People, to be
printed in a cheap and rudimentary format. 47 Moreover, Hirson had written a critical
review of The Awakening in 1957, which had conveyed his deep disagreement with
Tabata’s arguments for not providing an economic analysis of South African society
and for failing to analyse class divisions among blacks. Hirson had also criticised the
principle of non‐collaboration and the organisational methods of the AAC and the
NEUM. 48
In the 1990s, with the hindsight of memory and an assembled archive, Hirson sought
to establish a narrative of Tabata’s political life and to establish lines of biographic
causation in an evaluation of Tabata’s political positions. In this search for origins as a
means of explanation, Hirson proposed that it was undoubtedly the events at Bulhoek,
near Queenstown, in May 1921, when hundreds of Israelites, a church group, had been
killed or wounded by troops, which influenced Tabata “profoundly” and “helped
shape his perception of the nature of the struggle in South Africa”. But the
overwhelming explanation for Tabata’s political trajectory, for Hirson, was his
membership of the WPSA. After an almost obligatory mention of Tabata’s Lorry
Driver Union membership (no doubt following Karis and Carter), Hirson contended
that Tabata had joined the WPSA in about 1934 and “throughout his life endorsed the
47 Baruch Hirson, ‘The Dualism of I.B. Tabata’, p 63; Revolutions in My Life, p 231; Ciraj Rassool
interview with Baruch Hirson, Cape Town, 11/9/91. Hirson also suggested that Tabata seemed
dissatisfied with the less than elegant format of publication. Indeed when Tabata received the first
copies of the book in December 1950, a number of them were defective, and were summarily disposed
of. See I.B. Tabata Pocket Diary, entry for 9 December 1950, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
48 R Mettler (Pseudonym for Baruch Hirson), ‘It is Time to Awake!’ (mimeo), November 1957, Carter‐
Karis Microfilm Collection, 2: DA13:84/9. The other critical review had been written by Arthur Davids,
who had been a member of the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa in the 1940s and the
Forum Club in the 1950s; see Arthur Davids, ‘A Critical Analysis of I.B. Tabata’ Book “The All African
Convention or The Awakening of a People”’, Discussion, Vol 1, No 2, 1951 (Irwin Combrinck Papers).
For a personal account of these issues see Baruch Hirson, ‘A short History of the Non‐European Unity
Movement’, pp 84‐86.
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