The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Soon after Tabata arrived in Cape Town, he had found himself in the circles of the Lenin
Club and thereafter the Workers Party and its public debating forum, the Spartacus Club.
As we have suggested, Tabata’s mentor in the WPSA had been Claire Goodlatte, and other
members included Jane Gool, Paul Kosten, Ben Kies, S.A. Jayiya and Cadoc Kobus, J.G.
and Dora Taylor, and later Goolam Gool , under the leadership of Yudel Burlak.
Originally, therefore, Tabata and Dora Taylor were political comrades initially in the
Spartacus Club and later in the WPSA itself. It is likely that Tabata and Taylor started
working together beyond music and dramatic performance in the early 1940s as a WPSA
decision, within the ambit of the discipline of the party. Tabata had been assigned the full
time party duties of intervening in the national struggle from the late 1930s in the AAC 4
and other arenas and later in other public national formations such as the Anti‐CAD and
NEUM. From about 1941, Taylor was authorised to assist him in these endeavours.
In South Africa, this relationship spanned about twenty years of assistance by Taylor with
Tabata’s political writing, in the form of organisational and agitational letters,
interventionist pamphlets and longer texts of political education and social analysis.
During this time, their relationship also took on other dimensions, incorporating the soft
touches of music and literature alongside the heady strategic world of political
intervention. And in the everyday intensity of these entanglements, they also developed a
love relationship. What began as a working relationship as party members grew into a
vital intellectual and emotional partnership which went through different phases in South
Africa and overseas, and lasted until Taylor’s death in England in the mid‐1970s. Their
relationship was not a public one. In the first place, the political activities of the WPSA
into the collection. Taylor had marked this as possibly written in 1936, but it might have been 1937 or
1938, when Dora Taylor was composing songs and writing plays and operas for programmes of the
Spartacus Club. See Spartacus Club Programme, October Revolution Celebrations, Oddfellows Hall, 6
November 1937; May Day Celebrations, 1938, WPSA Papers. See also Dora Taylor to Paul Kosten
(undated, 1937/8?), WPSA Papers, in which she asks Kosten if he woundn’t “mind telling Kobus and
Tabata to bring {a} particular scene alas”. Taylor only became a member of the WPSA underground in
November 1938 (General Secretary, WPSA to Dora Taylor, 16 November 1938, WPSA Papers).
4 See undated letters to The Secretary, AAC, Bloemfontein certifying that Isaac Tabata and Jaineb Gool
were representatives of the Workers Party of South Africa (Cape Town Branch) (c1936); Minutes of the
meeting of the WPSA, Cape Town Branch, held at 99 Hatfield Street, 18 May 1936, WPSA Papers.
“Comrade Tabata” was listed as being “on Party business in Langa”.
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