The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

In the underground WPSA, however, the publication of The Awakening and the assertion
by Tabata of individual authorship in the public domain were seen as an expression of
impertinence and individual ambition, and were deemed to be a deviation from
centralised party authority and party discipline. Tabata had dared to write a book
without consulting Yudel Burlak, who usually provided party positions on key
questions. Tabata had “dared to voice in [the book] his own opinions without consulting
the party”. 130 While the WPSA ceased to exist from sometime in 1950 or soon thereafter,
it seems that this had been one of the conflicts that precipitated the growing public rift in
the Unity Movement through the 1950s. 131 In the meantime, with Dora Taylor’s
assistance, Tabata began to assert an independent locus of authority from that formerly
provided by the party. He also began to shift away from a strategic immersion in a
collective leadership and deliberately put himself forward as author of political
histories, principles and strategies without the veil of the pseudonym. This marked a
new politics of personhood and leadership in which authorship served as the precursor
of biography.
Once the threshold of collective leadership had been crossed and the political practice of
named, individuated authorship had been embraced as a deliberate strategy and
calculated risk, Tabata could not go back to the era of commitment to policy and collective
authority. The 1950s were a time of organisational realignment in the NEUM, with the
emergence of SOYA and other formations, such as the Progressive Forum in
Johannesburg, and other structures in Durban, which were seen as loyal to Tabata.
Between 1952 and 1956, a sequence of formal and informal discussions and meetings
130 Ciraj Rassool, Interview with Jane Gool, 25‐28 January 1991.
131 Jane Gool’s memory was that the WPSA ceased to exist “around the time of the Group Areas Act”,
when a suggestion was made to divide the party into black and white sections, which would meet on
separate days. This suggestion resulted in a walkout by some including Tabata and Jane Gool, and
seems to have partly been the cause of the party’s dissolution (Ciraj Rassool, Interview with Jane Gool,
25‐28 January 1991). By then the party had seen a number of escalating internal conflicts and tensions
involving a ‘ganging up’ of Burlak and Ben Kies against Tabata, and attempts within the party to
control Tabata’s written expression. From 1945, Burlak and Kies “wanted a hand” in The Voice. Tabata,
wrote Taylor “yielded to their egoism” (I.B Tabata Diary entries for 20 February 1944; 2 June 1944; 6
June 1944; Annotated Comments by Dora Taylor at the back of handwritten version of The Voice of the
AAC, No 3, April 1945, I.B Tabata Collection, BC 925). During the 1950s, these conflicts manifested
themselves publicly in the NEUM and its affiliates.
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