The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

epudiat[ed] the NEUM concept of leadership and a reversion
to the Dube‐Ka Seme tribalist cult of the chief or the leader, of
adulation and reverence for the elders and contempt for the
young. 16
This accusation was rejected by the AAC leadership with the counter‐claim that indeed
it was the “self‐styled”, “omniscient and omnipotent” group of four “foundationalists”
who were “busy creating the cult of the superman”. Viljoen, Jayiya, Kobus and Kies
were in turn accused of being “firm protagonists of the leader cult” by implying that
they “built the NEUM all on their own” and that members of affiliates “were merely
attached … as fellow‐travellers”. 17 These accusations and counter‐accusations about
leader‐cults, cliques and political loyalties constituted public contests over the meaning
of leadership and the suitability of relations of political patronage between older
political activists and younger members of political formations. It is out of both these
sides of this conflict that the impetus to narrate the life of I.B. Tabata, the leader,
emerged. And it is indeed significant that this biographic impetus coincided with
Tabata’s banning and the imposition of legal restrictions on his individual political will.
Indeed, these repressive circumstances were part of the conditions of biographic
production.
Until these biographic beginnings, Tabata’s life, like the lives of other political figures
such as Ben Kies, had been submerged within public organisational identities of the
Anti‐CAD, the AAC and the NEUM as part of what was seen as a ‘collective leadership’,
a cumulative system of ideas. This conception was seen as an advance upon older
political approaches. “There should be no leader or leaders”, Tabata argued at a meeting
in Durban in 1949, but only a “common leadership on a given programme under certain
16 R.E. Viljoen, S.A. Jayiya, C.M. Kobus and B.M. Kies, ‘What Has Happened in the Non‐European
Unity Movement?’
17 ‘The Wreckers of Unity at Work: who is the National Anti‐CAD Committee?’, Issued by the
Secretary, All‐African Convention Committee (WP), n.d (c.1959), Crowe‐Rassool Papers. It stands to
reason that I.B. Tabata was the author of this reply. The ‘Crowe‐Rassool Papers’ is a name I gave to the
mixed archive of Communist Party and Unity Movement materials which had been concealed in my
parents’ garage, and which had been drawn from the political activism of my maternal grandfather,
Daniel Crowe and my paternal uncles, Joe (Yousuf) and Nasim Rassool.
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