The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

their prominent placement in publications suggests the adoption of a presidential
paradigm as a means of foregrounding and defining the movement.
The provenance of each photograph that was circulated and projected is not entirely
clear. But one factor in the production of presidential images was the photography of
Michael Muskett, Dora Taylor’s son‐in‐law. Perhaps beginning as early as Tabata’s
secret England visit in 1962, Muskett began to photograph Tabata during his regular
visits to England in the 1960s and 1970s, and in this time, his photographs of Tabata
became more formal and stylised. This photography may have begun as assistance for
the organisational work of Dora Taylor. By the time Dora Taylor died in the mid‐1970s,
Muskett had assembled a full album of Tabata portraits, and at some point he even
contemplated publishing a book on Tabata based on these. 57 It is likely that some of the
Tabata images that found their way on to back covers of Tabata’s republished writings,
and which were circulated as one of the elements of the Unity Movement’s newfound
presidentialism, may have been those taken by Michael Muskett (Figure 9).
And in Lusaka at the beginning of 1965, coinciding with the presence in Lusaka of a
number of APDUSA members, the leadership of the Unity Movement went into the
photographic studio to record their movement’s existence in visual terms. They may
have failed to obtain recognition as a legitimate liberation movement from the
Committee of Nine of the OAU. 58 But they were intent on declaring their existence to the
world. In the studio, as the APDUSA members stood around their leaders, Nathaniel
57 I was fortunate enough to be able to look at this album when I visited Doreen and Michael Muskett
in Duntish, England, in 1992 to interview them. Michael Muskett also showed me his notes from his
interviews with Tabata, which he once conducted possibly in preparation for such a book. See Ciraj
Rassool, Interview with Doreen and Michael Muskett, 22 March 1992. One of his preoccupations
seemed to be with Tabata’s supposed royal Thembu lineage and notions of a birthright of leadership.
See M. Muskett, Untitled notes on I.B. Tabata’s family history and early life (n.d; author’s possession).
58 ‘See the failed submission by the Unity Movement: ‘South Africa: A Memorandum submitted to
Committee of Nine by the All‐African Convention and Non‐European Unity Movement’, Lusaka,
December 1963, Alexander Defense Committee Records, 1962‐1971, SML Microform, Sterling
Memorial Library, Yale University; see also ‘Statement by the AAC and NEUM justifying their rights
to the funds voted by the Liberation Committee of Nine’, December 1963, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC
925) and the critique of the OAU (‘The Crisis of the Organisation of African Unity and the Liberation
Movements’) in Apdusa (Special Edition), Vol II, No 5, Sept‐Oct 1966.
351