The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

policy that had envisaged redivided land to be held collectively after liberation, Tabata
announced that “land that was to be redivided could be sold as private property”. 53
These contradictions, for Hirson, were expressions of Tabata’s “dualism”, in terms of
which “as leaders of a national liberation movement”, a position to which they never
adapted, Tabata and his colleagues “were unable to advance socialist demands, while
the movement they led was based on a programme of bourgeois demands”. As they
tried to “conceal their Marxist background”, and “used nationalist rhetoric”, they
“misled countless men and women who believed that they were working for socialist
ends”. 54 In spite of these criticisms, Hirson conceded that Tabata had “significant
things to say”, and “there were aspects of his life that helped build the tradition [of
socialist internationalism]”. It was necessary to “give [him] his due for some of his
statements about the problems facing the African people”. 55
Both inside and on the outskirts of the academy, in the work of Allison Drew and
Baruch Hirson, I.B. Tabata’s political biography formed part of projects geared
towards the recovery of socialist pasts through documentary history methods of
archival sequencing and chronological narration. These recovery projects were
connected to political evaluations of the social analyses and political strategies of
socialist activists, in order to draw lessons from the storehouse of the past. Tabata’s life
history was turned into a comprehensible story of a rational political thinker and
activist, whose ‘dualist’ trajectory was explained by the self‐subordination by the
underground WPSA to bourgeois politics and nationalist demands. Tabata’s
biography was comprehended as part of the underground history of Trotskyism in
South Africa, whose existence had previously been concealed. As with the empiricist
lineage of Karis and Carter, Tabata’s biography, here, formed part of an approach to
the history of resistance politics, which sought to place hidden pasts of institutional
decisions and trajectories on record, utilising the statements and views of leaders. This
53 Baruch Hirson, ‘A Short History of the Non‐European Unity Movement’, p 85.
54 Baruch Hirson, ‘The Dualism of I.B. Tabata’, pp 59, 62; ‘A Short History of the Non‐European
Unity Movement’, p 64.
55 Baruch Hirson, ‘The Dualism of I.B. Tabata’, pp 59, 62.
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