The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

who were involved in the movement communicated with Tabata through Taylor. 41 With
this work, Taylor and Tabata became even more of a single unit of political production,
drawn even closer by repression into a vicarious relationship, and even one of
substitution. With this slightly wider contact, Taylor also cultivated intellectual
relationships with younger activists in the movement on her own terms, particularly
around cultural and literary questions. 42
Devotion, desire and biography
From the late 1940s, Tabata and Taylor’s relationship was also a space of biographic
production. Here they reflected upon, conceptualised and evaluated each other’s
formation as persons and writers. They drew upon their readings in the field of literary
autobiography. In reciprocal biographic acts, Tabata and Taylor narrated their own and
each other’s lives as intellectuals and writers, away from the public duty of collective
leadership, adherence to principle, and the rejection of individualism. And having come
to understand each other’s individual formation and social commitments, they offered
each other sanctuary, support, sustenance and the benefits of each other’s knowledge
and experience. This intense space of authorial production, political intervention and
biographic narration was a meeting place of the self and the movement, the individual
and the collective, the personal and the political. It is here where private lives and public
identities intersected. Political desires about “full democratic rights for all people in
South Africa” 43 were honed and nurtured behind the scenes in this borderland. This was
also a hybrid space of cultural expression and of theorising a politics of location and
identity of the self and nation.
who was referred to in the letter through the coded nickname, ‘The Cub’. In later years, Alma
Carolissen changed the spelling of her first name to ‘Elma’.
41 Jocelyn Tabata to Dora Taylor, 1 April 1957, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
42 We have already drawn attention to the connection Taylor had with Seymour Papert. She also had a
serious and wide‐ranging literary and cultural correspondence with young activist, Neville Alexander
in the late 1950s, when he was a doctoral student in Tübingen, Germany. They communicated about
Brecht, Chinese theatre, epic theatre and Dora Taylor’s plays. Of course, this correspondence was also
a means of keeping in touch with Tabata about progress on the idea of a German edition of Education
for Barbarism. See Neville Alexander to Dora Taylor, 23 November 1958; 12 December 1958, I.B. Tabata
Collection, BC 925.
43 I.B. Tabata to Mr Lehmann (The London Magazine), 29 June 1957, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
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