The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

political leadership was exercised through a politics of collective identification and
mobilisation.
Political expression occurred in formal, institutionalised settings, in which knowledge
production was influenced and determined by the disciplining effects of the
conventions of spoken and written language and expression, by the orderly rules and
conventions of meetings, and by hierarchies of membership and relations of loyalty
and respect for leaders. A simultaneously enabling and ordered political environment
of knowledge production was constituted, which also saw the concurrent formation
and regulation of citizens. The setting up of relations between speakers and listeners,
and writers and readers formed the basis of a hierarchical knowledge system that had
implications for notions of collective leadership. At the same time, the unfolding of a
progressist, evolutionary framework for comprehending the politics of history and the
history of politics set up relations between social and political forms deemed to be
advanced and those deemed to be backward or regressive. In terms of this framework,
the federal structure and loyalty to political ideas (and not individual leaders) were
understood as a more developed stage in the evolution of organised national
resistance. These were the contradictions inherent in a modernist political movement
seeking to comprehend and bring a secular order to society through institution
building, policy formation and processes of narration.
These arenas of knowledge creation and instruction were spaces of identity
performance in which selves were constituted discursively. I.B. Tabata was both
producer and product of this discourse community. As people were inscribed as
‘African’ and as ‘non‐European’, and ‘non‐European’ figured as the basis of political
unity, Tabata was himself being constituted in political terms. Tabata was made both
in his relationships with layers of comrades in public and clandestine formations as
well as in the borderland spaces between the public and the private.
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