The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

included a focus on underground political formations and their agency in shaping
political direction.
These efforts to understand the trajectory of Tabata’s political life also sought to assess
his analyses of South African conditions as well as the political strategies he advocated
and embarked upon. While Drew has suggested that Tabata failed to understand rural
conditions and the extent of proletarianisation, Hirson focused on Tabata’s failure to
break from the rhetorics and organising strategies of nationalism. Tabata and the
leadership of the NEUM, Hirson argued further, created a hallmark out of “never
enter[ing] a political struggle, except verbally”. They “spoke, condemned, insulted and
threatened”, Hirson suggested, “but did not engage in political action, neither in the
rural areas nor in the towns”. 56 This not infrequent assessment was turned on its head
in the more directly partisan research of APDUSA member, Robin Kayser, on the
NEUM and the Land Question. And as with Hirson’s research, the methodological
basis of Kayser’s work was archival and documentary, in an attempt to place on
record ‐ in the form of an academic thesis ‐ the hidden history of the Unity
Movement’s past. Whereas for Hirson, any political practice on the part of the NEUM
was almost entirely absent, for Kayser, it was to be found beyond mere radical
political statements, in the evidence of rural organising and mobilisation. 57
Kayser (with Adhikari) drew on evidence from the Tabata Collection at UCT, from
official APDUSA papers, as well as from personal testimony of APDUSA “operatives”
‐ “material hitherto not available to researchers” ‐ to recover a history of APDUSA’s
role in organising and mobilisation, especially in rural areas in the early 1960s. 58 The
56 Baruch Hirson, ‘The Dualism of I.B. Tabata’, p 62.
57 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”: The African People’s Democratic
Union of Southern Africa during the 1960s’ (Typescript of article prepared for the ‘Road to
Democracy’ Research Project of the South African Democracy Education Trust ‐ SADET). This was
drawn partly from Kayser’s graduate research. See Robin Kayser, ‘Land and Liberty!: The Non‐
European Unity Movement and the Land Question, 1933‐1976’, M.A. Thesis, University of Cape
Town, 2002. Here (p 3) Kayser describes his research objective as “the recovery and accurate
recording of the NEUM’s political activity in the countryside”.
58 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”’, p 2. In drawing upon the Tabata
Collection in his research for his thesis as well as for his collaborative research paper for SADET’s
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