The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

us as enemies for the reason that we have had to expose
their machinations in order to keep the movements free from
their inimical and dangerous influences. 175
Faced with the charge that they were not known by the world, Tabata and his colleagues
presented a document about their organisations and their plans in order to supplement
their original statement with which the NEUM’s application for recognition had been
made. To this they appended a list of the federal body with affiliates, names of officials
and their regions in South Africa in order to give a sense of a national presence. But the
key characteristic of this response was the adoption of biography as the prime method of
asserting a real existence in the struggle against apartheid. And the biographic format
that was chosen was the biography of victimisation and persecution. A cryptic list of
repression experiences of NEUM officials was composed as proof of its existence. The
experiences of Honono, Canca, Hassim, Mqotsi, Limbada, Tsotsi and Jane Gool of house
arrest, imprisonment without trial, ‘pegging’, reluctant, enforced asylum, and banning
were catalogued. The biography of persecution of I.B. Tabata, the president of the
NEUM affiliate, APDUSA, was accorded special attention. It was he who “was the first
to be imprisoned by the Verwoerd government” in 1948, who served a five‐year ban,
and who “narrowly escaped arrest under the 90‐Day Detention Act”. “All these
incidents of arrests and banishments” had been “deliberately suppressed” because “our
group of organisations [was] regarded as the direst enemy”. 176
In the next few years, following on from its response to the OAU rejection, the
biography of victimisation and persecution represented one of the main modes through
which the Unity Movement depicted itself, its structures and cadres. In December 1964,
the Lusaka office of the AAC and the Unity Movement composed a much more
extensive list of “instances of the victimisation of our people” that “did not hit the
headlines of the outside world”. The five‐page list presented accounts of the experiences
175 ‘Statement by the AAC and NEUM justifying their rights to the funds voted by the Liberation
Committee of Nine’, December 1963, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
176 ‘Statement by the AAC and NEUM justifying their rights to the funds voted by the Liberation
Committee of Nine’, December 1963, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
386