The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

handwriting, which had been prepared for submission to Umteteli wa Bantu. 87 By 1943,
she was intervening significantly, making suggestions for wording and paragraphs, in
the preparation of a text for presentation to the AAC Conference of December 1943. 88
Drafts of letters were often prepared in both Tabata and Taylor’s script, but mostly
solely in Taylor’s script, indicating the possibility of dictation or the work of an
amanuensis. Many strategic letters often saw substantial overwriting by Taylor, the
adding of words into sentences and the incorporation of new sentences in ways that
contributed substantially to their meaning. 89 Sometimes, critical written interventions
under Tabata’s pseudonym seem to have had their origins in texts in Taylor’s
handwriting, which may have resulted from dictation, but more likely may have been
the product of joint thinking, discussion and formulation. 90 Indeed, it can be argued
unequivocally that at crucial moments, Dora Taylor participated directly in the setting
out of political policy and in the production of meaning in what was a single,
productive, knowledge‐producing unit.
Michael Muskett expressed the full range of Tabata and Taylor’s collaborative efforts in
the following way:
They worked together in absolute collaboration, teasing out precise
meaning and dressing it to give it colour. And they would … think
nothing of spending fifteen minutes on a sentence … until they got
the formulation and the sensitivities to it just right and the balance
right. [If they] didn’t quite like the way that document [came out]
they would re‐write it. [Later] he would come over and stay for a
few weeks and again the writing would continue, whether it was
letters or analyses or [work on] the international situation.
87 B Penza (I.B. Tabata), Draft of Letter to Editor, Umteteli wa Bantu, c.August 1941, I.B. Tabata
Collection, BC 925. This letter demanded that Jabavu and the rest of the older leadership of the AAC
commit themselves to the AAC conference at Bloemfontein in December 1941, or else “give way to
younger and more energetic men”. Many other documents in the collection, which date to the early
1940s, bear Taylor’s annotated markings, which had been added subsequently as part of editorial work
that she did in the planning of publications.
88 See for example, ‘Full Text of Political Review presented to the Conference of the AAC, December
1943’, Tabata Collection, BC 925.
89 See for example Circular Letter from I.B. Tabata, n.d. (c.1943), I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
90 See for example the various handwritten and typed (and annotated) versions of ‘We Accuse’,
published eventually as a pamphlet in early 1948, but which bore a draft title, ‘Mountains, Labour and
Produce: A Rat’.
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