The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

“effectively … smashed within the country”. All that was left of the organisation by
1972 “was a small contingent of leaders in exile”. 62
In attempting to set the documentary record of resistance history straight, Kayser’s
account (with Adhikari) of APDUSA’s rural organising in the 1960s was, for the most
part, a conventional account, which also contained a basic biographical element. The
basic elements of the historical narrative were identifying political organisations,
institutions and structures, tracing political policies, decisions and acts of mobilisation,
and tracking political leadership and office bearers at the national level. Here the lives
of I.B. Tabata, Leo Sihlali, Wycliffe Tsotsi, Karrim Essack, and others were woven into
an account of rural mobilisation and subsequent political repression. What set this
resistance narrative apart from others, however, was that it drew on evidence of
resistance lives in rural areas ‐ based on interviews with rural activists ‐ to understand
the extent of rural mobilisation on the part of APDUSA, and APDUSA’s impact.
Kayser also drew on evidence presented about their mobilising activities by local
APDUSA activists in the APDUSA trial, State vs Kader Hassim and 12 others.
The key life history that was foregrounded in this account was that of I.B Tabata,
whose political trajectory was narrated as a “key ideologue” and “key theoretician”,
who “entered radical politics” as a “founder member” of the WPSA, 63 and who had
“placed great emphasis on practical political activity and [who] undertook annual
tours of the Transkei and Ciskei during the 1940s and 1950s to propagate the ideas of
the NEUM”. 64 In his thesis, Kayser devoted substantial attention to Tabata’s life
history and his “unique contribution” in “initiating and familiarising the rural
dwellers with the political ideas of the AAC, and in “establishing the basis” through
which the AAC approached the peasantry. This was a biography of rural activism and
political organising “at both ends of the migratory labour system”, in which Tabata
62 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”’, pp 16‐19; see also Robin Kayser,
‘Land and Liberty!: The Non‐European Unity Movement and the Land Question, 1933‐1976’, Ch 7.
63 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”’, p 3.
64 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”’, p 3.
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