The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

quisling intellectuals”, Tabata argued. 135 Three months after the publication of ‘The
Boycott’, Tabata wrote to Seymour Papert about its effects:
In one district, the delegates from the CATA Conference
were selling the ‘Boycott’, for which, by the way, there was a
great demand. Some headmen came running to the
Commissioner asking if anything could be done to ban such
literature that was ‘influxing’ the district. That gave me to
feel that it hits where it is sore. 136
By using the word ‘influx’ to describe the headmen’s complaints about ‘The Boycott’,
Tabata was, of course, referencing state policies of control over the movement of African
people between rural and urban areas. At the same time, this was a reference to his own
pamphlet from 1944 which had critiqued these policies. This also represented a
suggestion that Tabata had begun to think about his own writings as constituting a
corpus, a written body of coherent political thinking.
When Tabata was banned in 1956, among the alleged statements gathered by the
agencies of the state and relied on by the Minister of Justice for the decision, were
extracts from his writings. As part of the surveillance of his political activities, the state
had deemed at least 29 lines from ‘The Rehabilitation Scheme’ and 22 lines from ‘The
Boycott’ as evidence of furthering “the achievement of the objects of Communism”, of
“vilifying the majority of the European inhabitants of the Union as oppressors” or of
“inciting the non‐Europeans to resist”. 137 Read together with a compilation of statements
allegedly made by Tabata at meetings across the country between 1948 and 1955, this
compilation of extracts from Tabata’s resistance writing and speeches by the apartheid
state represented a malicious, unauthorised anthology of Tabata’s political and
intellectual labour. As part of a perverse, repressive biography, the state had turned
Tabata’s words, uttered and written in his own name, on himself by banning him from
gatherings, restricting his movements and attempting to isolate him. This had the effect
of contributing to the process of Tabata’s individuation, and added to the idea that
135 I.B. Tabata, ‘The Boycott as Weapon of Struggle’, pp 18‐19.
136 I.B. Tabata to Seymour Papert, 19 September 1952, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
137 Acting Secretary of Justice to Lawyer (name erased), 28 May 1956, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
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