The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

This undoubtedly resulted in knowledge being produced behind a veil of collectivity,
while the individuated and collaborative processes of production went unacknowledged
in the service of collective mobilisation and principled unity. In the process, it is
possible that the potential individualising consequences of writing and authorship may
have been temporarily offset.
However, Tabata’s writing, whether or not under his own name, was not entirely
individual. The Tabata Collection provides ample evidence that his writing emerged out
of his relationship with fellow‐WPSA member Dora Taylor, one that was marked by
intense and on‐going political and personal interchange. The home of academic
psychologist J.G. Taylor and his wife Dora was a studious one, “two people in two
different rooms working”. 75 According to Jane Gool, it was with Dora Taylor’s
encouragement that Tabata started to write. Indeed, with Taylor and in the studious
atmosphere of her Claremont home, Tabata became immersed in a programme of
writing that was one of the core elements of his full‐time political work. In Gool’s words
Taylor “became his secretary, took down the writing, and criticised and so on”. And the
quality of this writing surprised Gool, who up till then thought that Tabata was more at
home “on the platform”. 76
Dora Taylor herself had been immersed in a programme of creative and political writing
as well as literary criticism, having herself been encouraged to “fulfil herself” and “do
what she was qualified for” by Claire Goodlatte. 77 In the late 1930s, in the WPSA’s
Spartacus Club, Taylor wrote plays which were performed by members. 78 And from
1939, in Trek, she found an outlet for her political analyses, social commentary and
literary scholarship. 79 While she became known mainly as a literary scholar, it is
75 I.B. Tabata, Oration at Dora Taylor’s Memorial Service, c.1976.
76 Interview with Jane Gool, Harare, 25‐28 January 1991.
77 I.B. Tabata, Oration at Dora Taylor’s Memorial Service, 1976.
78 Dora Taylor to ‘Comrade Tabata’, nd, (1936/7), Tabata Collection, BC 925.
79 Dora Taylor expressed her delight at the emergence of Trek in 1939 as a bilingual, biweekly “family
magazine for all South Africans” out of its predecessor, Independent. She had found the first issue
“stimulating”, and found that there was “something for everyone on every page” (Letter from Dora
Taylor, Trek, 31 August 1939).
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