The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

historical understandings, Taylor’s pen was also deployed to produce historical texts. Her
research in the mid‐1940s attempted to “piece the whole story together” on the killing of
Chief Hintsa by the British forces in 1835. This led her to question the methods of the
Wesleyan missionaries whose letters, eagerly used by D’Urban, had been “designed to
blacken the character and behaviour of Hintza (sic)”. 6 Just as Tabata’s writings were
produced through a relationship with Taylor, so Tabata supported her writing through
reading drafts of chapters, and assisting with roneoing copies for distribution. 7 In 1948,
after Taylor had completed the play, Hintsa, with Tabata’s help it was marshalled in the
service of building the NEUM.
Tabata forwarded copies of Hintsa to influential activists in the fold of the NEUM around
the country such as Nathaniel Honono and others. His purpose was to ask individuals to
get their organisations to “consider staging [the] play … with whatever means you have at
your disposal”. Tabata suggested that it be performed for fundraising on a fifty‐fifty basis,
with half the proceeds going to organisation which staged it, and the rest to the funds of
the NEUM and to the “printing and translation fund”. While the Unity Movement needed
funds “very urgently”, it was also “necessary that the play should be translated into the
vernaculars before it can reach the masses of the people”. Drama, he suggested was “one
form of literature which can speak to the people directly”. It needed to be introduced “not
only to the intellectuals but to the masses of the people”. Even “the illiterate” could
“understand it, and themselves stage drama”. And this play sought to give African youth
“a past of which they can be proud and to restore also their self‐respect”. Through this
play, they would become “aware of the true nature of the struggles of our people, [and of]
the dignity and the spirit of resistance”. Before any questions were raised, Tabata
reiterated that “the authorship of the play” was “necessarily anonymous”. 8
6 Dora Taylor to I.B. Tabata, May 1945, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925. On the killing of Hintsa more
generally and the question of evidence, see Premesh Lalu, ‘The Grammar of Domination and the
Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence’, History and Theory, Volume 39, No. 4,
December 2000.
7 Dora Taylor, Pocket Diary, Entries for 14 February; 10 March; 24 June 1948, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC
925.
8 Circular Letter from I.B. Tabata, 18 August 1948, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925. Dora Taylor recorded
in her Pocket Diary (entry for 19 August 1948) that eight copies of Hintsa were mailed to the Transkei.
399