The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

CHAPTER SIX
FROM COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP TO PRESIDENTIALISM:
PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES, AUTHORSHIP AND
I.B. TABATA’S BIOGRAPHY
If one’s objective is to historicise the idea of I.B. Tabata as a leader with a biography,
then it is possible to show that narrations of I.B. Tabata’s life emerged for the first time,
in tentative ways, at the time of his arrest at Mount Ayliff in the Transkei in September
1948. These biographic intonations were taken further in 1956 when Tabata was banned
for five years under the Suppression of Communism Act. While repression served as a
threshold for biography, the process of individuation that accompanied Tabata’s writing
and claims on authorship ultimately could not be contained within the principled code
of collective leadership and adherence to principle that characterised the movement’s
politics during the 1940s. This transition from collectivity to individuation is also the
hallmark of the domain of visual representation, and a shift can be discerned in which
photographic reluctance and reticence gave way to an opening up to the camera and the
embracing of the codes of portraiture. By the 1960s, a shift had occurred from biographic
ambivalence to a politics of presidentialism in which Tabata’s biography became a key
aspect of projecting the movement in exile.
Historicising Tabata’s biography
In 1948, Tabata was arrested on charges under the Transkei Penal Code and the Riotous
Assembies Act of “unlawfully incit[ing]” people to disobey legal measures seeking to
enforce stock culling. 1 A.C. Jordan, Tabata’s colleague in the AAC, produced a circular
letter in his private capacity informing people of the political circumstances of Tabata’s
arrest, asking for “the support of each and every African and African organisation”, and
1 ‘Rex vs Isaac Tabata, N/M., Age 38, Mount Ayliff Criminal Case No. __/1948’ (Indictment), I.B. Tabata
Collection, BC 925.
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