The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Honono, Jane Gool and I.B. Tabata, the image of the political movement became marked
by greater assertiveness and openness to the camera. Also apparent was a newfound
sense of formality, and a distinct sense of hierarchy and presidentialism, which were in
keeping with the character of exile politics (Figure 10). It was as if Tabata was acting out
the ‘cult of the chief or leader’, which had been the basis of accusations against him in
1959. The posing and image‐making carried over into the movement’s Head Office in
Lusaka which had “a huge, big portrait of the president”. 59 It also extended beyond the
photographic image, as the order of presidentialism was enacted in the everyday life of
the movement.
Authorship, individuation and the biographic threshold
The transition from “selflessness” 60 to ‘presidentialism’ was also a feature of Tabata’s
history as a writer and author. Indeed, the subsuming of the self by the political activist
into the political formations and ideas of the collective was not always as clear‐cut as
Tabata made it seem in 1946 in his correspondence with Mnguni and Wycliffe Tsotsi. In
the first place, in exhorting Tsotsi to author a text that had already been written by Dora
Taylor as a review of a written intervention circulated under the name ‘B Somvinane’,
Tabata was exercising the authority of his leadership in the All African Convention, in
spite of the fact that he held no formal office at the national level in that body. 61
Leadership may have been conceptualised and projected as collective and the rejection
59 Ciraj Rassool, Interview with Livingstone Mqotsi, London, 3 March 1992.
60 In a speech to the 1955 Cape African Teachers’ Association (CATA) conference, Tabata contrasted
‘selflessness’ and “complete devotion to the cause”, conceptualised as “greater than the individual”,
with the “reckless actions” and “stunts and pranks” of the 1950s campaigns by Congress, which were
predicated on “individual sacrifice”. See Notes for Speech, CATA Conference, 1955, Tabata Collection,
BC 925.
61 It is clear that Tabata drew a distinction between leadership and the holding of political office in the
“straitjacket of officialdom”. In December 1948, Wycliffe Tsotsi was elected to the Presidency of the
AAC, as part of a strategy to “get rid of Jabavu”. Someone had to be found to replace D.D.T. Jabavu
who was “young, well‐known, acceptable to the country and above all trustworthy and in full accord
with the policy of Convention”. In taking responsibility for Tsotsi’s election, Tabata expressed his guilt
to him as follows: “I felt I had sacrificed you in a way to the exigencies of the time”. This “sacrifice” he
argued, had been “forced upon us” and he saw it as temporary, to “tide us over a difficult period”.
“Your job and my job are in the field”, he suggested to Tsotsi, “[and] on the floor of the house,
hammering out a new policy or fighting for the implementation of one that has been decided upon”
(I.B. Tabata to Wycliffe Tsotsi, 22 February 1949, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925). In the 1940s and
1950s, Tabata was at most a provincial representative on the AAC executive. It was only in 1961 that
he was elected President of APDUSA.
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