The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Political biography emerged as a key aspect of this knowledge system, and narrations
of I.B. Tabata’s political life, produced and projected within particular biographic
relations and under changing conditions, were at the centre of attempts to provide a
historical basis for political claims. It was the written word and claims to authorship
that provided the conditions of individuation, and served as the threshold of
biography. The emergence of a politics of presidentialism out of a prior emphasis on
collective leadership is also discernable in photographic depictions. As we shall see,
Tabata’s long‐standing association with Dora Taylor was the key relation through
which biographic representations of his life were produced. This occurred in a
borderland, a transitional space between the public and the private, and the political
and the personal that mirrored the cleavage between public and clandestine political
activity.
These narrations were not without significant political contests and challenges, which
coincided with increasing fragility and tenuousness of the political movement. These
challenges were the consequence of relations of paternalism and patronage which
Tabata had cultivated. This political arena was not the only setting in which Tabata’s
biography was constructed and contested. His funeral in 1990 in Lesseyton, outside
Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, unleashed a submerged Christian narration
alongside a secular political one, as a weakened political movement was unable to
assert a triumphant political narrative. These issues of production and contestation in
the history of Tabata’s biography are the subject of exploration in Chapters Six, Seven
and Eight.
324