The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

were shifted entirely to the underground after 1939. Moreover, there was a racial
dimension: white party members did not engage in public political work. Dora Taylor’s
intellectual and political work was necessarily ‐ in the Party’s terms ‐ covert and even
clandestine. Indeed, this relationship was conducted in a borderland, a space between the
public and private, and between the official and the clandestine which was
simultaneously a space of desire.
In the unfolding of this political and personal relationship between Tabata and Taylor,
political commitment and allegiance to party and political principle became overlaid by
loyalty to each other and mutual devotion. Dora Taylor was utterly dedicated to Tabata,
and to ensuring the success of his political endeavours, in ways that evoked the
‘selflessness’ and duty to the cause that Tabata spoke about in the political sphere. It was
she who facilitated and assisted in the production of political ideas and strategies under
Tabata’s name. This effacing of the self on Taylor’s part lasted until 1963 and that left her
feeling publicly unacknowledged. In return, Tabata supported Taylor’s efforts at literary
and historical writing, and assisted in the attempts to have these published. These
exchanges occurred in the everyday unfolding of their relationship. Even when Tabata
was away from Cape Town, Taylor was moved to write to him about feeling “deeply
lonely” in the process of writing, about its progress and her discoveries in her research. 5
In the 1940s and early 1950s, Taylor researched South Africa’s colonial past, seeking to
revise the “distortions of history” in colonial and missionary archives. While her historical
research was geared towards the writing of plays and novels, which were grounded in
5 Dora Taylor to I.B. Tabata, May 1945, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925. By this time, Tabata had simply
become ‘B’ for Taylor, a shortening used also by Wycliffe Tsotsi, but which for her became a term of
endearment. ‘B’ was of course short for Bangani, his Xhosa name. By this time, Tabata had become
known publicly by his initials, and was almost never addressed as ‘Isaac’. To his comrades in the
Unity Movement in the 1950s, he was sometimes referred to as ‘Tabata’ or the shortened ‐ and partly
anglicised ‐ ‘Tabbie’. Leo Sihlali addressed him affectionately as ‘Taba’. In the age of presidentialism,
when he had become the more formal ‘Mr Tabata’ in the movement, this was sometimes turned into
the slightly less formal ‘Mr T’. To Jane Gool, he was ‘T’ or ‘Tee’. To his sisters, particularly Jocelyn or
Funeka, he was affectionately called ‘Old Boy’, ‘Smovana’, ‘Buti Smallie’ or ‘Bhuti Smallone’, and to
acquaintances of his own generation, with whom he had been at Lovedale (such as Govan Mbeki), he
was known as ‘Dwarf’. Some of his correspondents from the Eastern Cape and Transkei (such as
George Matanzima) called Tabata by his clan name, ‘Mndungwane’.
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