The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

took ideas to the rural areas and “acted as an important link between town and
country”. 65
It was the archival collection constituted as the I.B. Tabata Collection that determined
much of the narrative of Kayser’s account of APDUSA in the 1960s. Indeed, Tabata’s
opinions, observations and political explanations as well as the sequence of his
activites, as gathered from the Collection, drove the account. It was Tabata’s
“optimistic report” on his secret journey to Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Tanzania
and Kenya in 1962, undertaken after his ban had expired, and his securing of a
promise of Algerian assistance, that led to the decision by the NEUM executive in
January 1963 to “embark on armed struggle”. A few months after leaving South Africa
(along with Jane Gool and Nathaniel Honono), following a decision of the executive
committee in March 1963, Tabata had the opportunity to be briefed by and to engage
with Pondoland leaders and organisers about their plans for armed struggle. It was
Tabata’s efforts that led to promises of financial and military assistance. Once the
internal structures of APDUSA and UMSA had been decimated by repression and
imprisonment, Tabata was at the centre of the ‘small contingent’ of leaders that
remained in exile. 66
The importance of Kayser’s research (and the article written with Adhikari) lay in the
documentary truths that he sought to place on record as evidence of significant rural
mobilisation in the Eastern Cape and Transvaal during the 1960s, for which APDUSA
had not been accorded any historiographical credit. 67 In documentary terms, it also
challenged a number of stereotypes associated with the Unity Movement, of its
character and spread being largely coloured and Western Cape. 68 However, the
65 Robin Kayser, ‘Land and Liberty!: The Non‐European Unity Movement and the Land Question,
1933‐1976’, pp 25‐28.
66 Robin Kayser and Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Land and Liberty!”’, pp 8‐18.
67 Kayser’s research has enabled the political commitment made by APDUSA in 1995 “to write the
true history of the Pondoland rebellion” to be realised. See The APDUSAN, Vol 1, No 1, July 1995.
68 See inter alia Ian Goldin, Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Coloured Identity in South
Africa (London and New York: Longman, 1987), which located the NEUM in a narrative of the
radicalisation of coloured politics. See also Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of
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