The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

us”. Goolam Gool, he had argued, was someone who had “died several years ago”,
though he had been “buried only a few weeks ago”. 82
In Pietermaritzburg, at a commemoration held by the APDUSA branch, Tabata
expanded on his Cape Town presentation, and dealt inter alia with Goolam Gool’s social
origins and his formation as someone with “a rounded outlook” from which “his
political ideas and principles were drawn”. Gool had been “the embodiment of all that
the organisations [had] stood for”. That was why it was necessary, Tabata argued, “for
the renegades to destroy him” when “the great land‐slide of the whole Coloured petit‐
bourgeois, the intellectuals, left the movement”. It had been necessary “to destroy the
man in order to facilitate the destruction of what he stood for”. 83 Tabata ended by
suggesting that
what had been buried a few weeks ago … was not the Dr G.H.
Gool we all knew. It was the dregs of him, the earth and dust.
That part which was consecrate to us, the better part of him,
was killed a long time ago. What remained and lived on was a
being, spiritually maimed, intellectually lacerated and morally
wounded. 84
Tabata also expressed his frustration with the lack of public knowledge about Nathaniel
Honono, who had been described in reports about his ban as “just a managing director
of an insurance company, as if a man can be banned for being just that”. Tabata had
resolved “to write about it to expose the role of the press”. And he announced to Taylor
that he had “already made a draft”. 85 The result was an anonymously written biography
of Nathaniel Honono, which attempted to set the record straight about his political
contribution as a member of CATA, and about the effects of repressive measures that he
and his colleagues had experienced. 86 This tract authored by Tabata represented the
start of the focus on biographies of repression, which became one of the means by which
82 I.B. Tabata to Dora Taylor, 7 December 1962, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
83 I.B. Tabata to Dora Taylor, 24 January 1963, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
84 I.B. Tabata to Dora Taylor, 24 January 1963, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
85 I.B. Tabata to Dora Taylor, 2 January 1963, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
86 ‘Who is this Mr N. Honono Now Serving a Five Year Ban and Placed Under House Arrest?’, n.d. (c.
February 1963), I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
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