The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

political training did not take place under the tutelage of white liberals”. 30 In the detail
of this narrative, it was Claire Goodlatte, the ‘Red Nun’ who had been Gool and Tabata’s
WPSA mentor and trainer in political theory, who had granted “the responsibility of
leadership” to Tabata and Jane Gool. 31 Jane Gool recalled this moment in Goodlatte’s
house in York Street, Woodstock in about 1935 in solemn terms:
I got such a shock that the hairs on my skin rose, I got cold….
[Tabata] stammered [and said] ‘I never thought of myself as a
leader….’ It was like a tidal wave had hit us all. Both of us grew
pale with shock. We moved out of the house. I looked at him and
he at me, and we stood naked, as it were. We knew then that we
were going to be burdened with the responsibility of leadership….
There was nobody else. And although we denied it … although
we pushed it to the back of our minds, nevertheless we knew that
that was a task which we could not avoid. 32
The Unity Movement of South Africa was given a seamless history, which went back
to the formation of the Non‐European Unity Movement in 1943‐44. 33 This represented
an attempt to create ‘non‐European unity’ through uniting the Anti‐CAD and the
AAC, and it was Tabata who had outlined the foundations for the ‘Building of Unity’
in an address to the Second Unity Conference in 1945. 34 The key methodology of
nation‐building through the medium of these organisations was the federal structure
in which organisations from civic bodies and cultural societies to sports clubs and
church bodies could affiliate and be brought into the fold. Another breakthrough in
organisational terms had been the formation of APDUSA in 1961, the ‘unitary’ body
30 Norman Traub, ‘I.B. Tabata’ (Obituary), The Independent, 3 November 1990.
31 Interview with Jane Gool, Harare, 25‐28 January 1991; younger members would have been taught to
be circumspect about the specifically Marxist, underground elements of this narrative. In a speech at
Dora Taylor’s memorial service after her death in 1976, Tabata himself referred cryptically to
Goodlatte (without mentioning her name) as one of the people who had “helped to mould” him. It
was she who “showed us how to live” (I.B. Tabata, Oration at Dora Taylor’s Memorial Service, 1976,
copy in author’s possession, courtesy of Doreen and Michael Muskett).
32 Interview with Jane Gool, Harare, 25‐28 January 1991.
33 Indeed, the name UMSA (chosen to build and propagate the organisation in exile after ‘Non‐
European’ had been dropped in 1964 in favour merely of ‘Unity Movement’ or ‘UM’) was
anachronistically transported back in time and given an existence in the 1940s in some biographic
narrations. See Amina Hughes, video interview with I.B. Tabata and Jane Gool, 10 September 1989.
34 ‘“The Basis of Unity” (by B.M. Kies) and “The Building of Unity” (by I.B. Tabata), Two Addresses
delivered at the 3 rd Unity Conference Held in the Banqueting Hall, Cape Town on 4 th & 5 th January,
1945’, Issued by the Non‐European Unity Committee, 1945, Crowe‐Rassool Papers.
335