The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

the eastern Cape about which she wrote, and for access to readers who mattered to her,
Tabata relied upon Taylor for support with his writing and political endeavours. Having
set out as political comrades in the WPSA, who worked together to extend the party’s
influence and spread its strategies of political mobilisation through Tabata’s public
activism, Tabata and Taylor’s political and intellectual relationship of mutual
dependence became more multifaceted and deeply entangled, and extended
substantially to the emotional and the personal. Alongside their political work and
authorship, they shared common bonds and passions over the literary works of
Shakespeare, and the art of Chaplin. They both became intensely aware of each other’s
strengths and vulnerabilities. And it is clear that by the late 1940s and early 1950s, they
had fallen in love.
Forgetting to take his copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets on his trip to the Eastern Cape in
1951 was enough cause for him to write to Taylor imploring “to be welcomed home by
[a recital of] one” by her. 22 Lines from Macbeth and other Shakespearean works were
incorporated into the political analyses and cultural observations, which they exchanged
on an almost daily basis, and Shakespearean texts were major references for Taylor in
her processing of the political and emotional complexities she was embroiled in and for
Tabata to make sense of rural social experience. 23 When Seymour Papert spent time in
Cape Town in 1953, Tabata and Taylor presented him with Shakespeare and Tabata read
Shakespeare’s works out aloud to him as an integral part of clarifying the political
problems of Johannesburg. 24 In the 1950s, Richard Wagner’s opera based on the legend
of Tristan and Isolde, which explored different facets of mature adult love, formed
another cultural reference in their unfolding relationship. 25
22 I.B. Tabata to Dora Taylor, 23 August 1951, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
23 Dora Taylor, Extended Diary, Entry for 11 June 1953, Dora Taylor Papers; I.B. Tabata to Dora Taylor,
23 August 1951, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
24 Dora Taylor, Extended Diary, Entry for 12 August 1953, Dora Taylor Papers.
25 I.B. Tabata to Dora Taylor, 6 January 1956; 9 April 1956, I.B. Tabata Papers, BC 925. Tabata ended
these letters to Taylor with the phrase “Tristan make room”.
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