The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

principles of that organisation”. 49 It was as a member of the WPSA that Tabata, along
with Goolam and Jane Gool, attended the All‐African Convention convened in 1935 to
organise a campaign against the Hertzog Bills. In 1943, the NEUM became “the almost
exclusive activity” of WPSA members in an “inverted entryism” in which “populist
movements were established so that Trotskyists could enter them, and even be their
leader”. 50
For Hirson, it was Tabata, influenced by the “credo” of the WPSA, who had “played a
prominent role in defining the attitudes that became the hallmark of the NEUM”,
including the call for the vote, the use of the boycott as a weapon as well as opposition
to the rehabilitation scheme. 51 While the NEUM had included varied organisations
and groups in its fold, and drew both from an older, more conservative layer as well
as the “young turks” of the WPSA, it was left to Tabata and his associates to give
direction. It was they who “had a grasp of programmatic problems that exceeded
anything previously formulated”. Because the land question had been central to the
WPSA as “the alpha and omega”, Tabata had recognised that the rehabilitation
scheme would be a key focus of rural resistance. And while he (and other NEUM
leaders) “continued to speak of the workers as if they were only peasants temporarily
in the towns or the mines”, he erred in relegating the working class to “second class
status in the struggle”. 52
Indeed, in spite of being socialists “with an internationalist outlook”, the propagation
of democratic demands by Tabata and his colleagues “tied them into a nationalist
framework from which they could not break”. The logic of this position in the late
1950s was confirmed in Tabata’s analysis of “emergent” African nationalism as
“genuinely anti‐imperialist and anti‐colonialism”. At this time, in contrast to previous
49 Baruch Hirson, ‘The Dualism of I.B. Tabata’, p 59.
50 Baruch Hirson, ‘The Trotskyist Groups in South Africa, 1932‐1948, in Searchlight South Africa, No
10, April 1993, pp 81; 90‐91.
51 Baruch Hirson, ‘The Dualism of I.B. Tabata’, p 61; ‘A Short History of the Non‐European Unity
Movement’, p 65.
52 Baruch Hirson,‘A Short History of the Non‐European Unity Movement’, p 66; ‘The Dualism of
I.B. Tabata’, p 62.
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