The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

authored pamphlets aimed at “clarifying the political tasks confronting the oppressed
people of South Africa as a whole”. 104
The biographical article drew attention to the “important part” Tabata played in
resistance to the Rehabilitation Scheme, which it suggested the AAC “was helping the
peasants to organise”. It also made mention of Tabata’s arrest and acquittal, which
“gave considerable impetus” to peasant resistance. The article surveyed Tabata’s major
written works and speeches and discussed his experience of being banned by the
apartheid state. It ended with a discussion of his presidential address to the first
APDUSA conference. 105 In the process, the Taylor’s article referred to Tabata’s special
attributes, of how
he holds a listening crowd with the clarity and forcefulness
of his political ideas made vivid by the vigour and
homeliness of images that speak to the peasant, especially
when he addresses them in Xhosa. 106
And “in dealing with opponents”, it suggested, Tabata was “swift and formidable in his
intransigence”, especially when it came to the violation of “a question of principle”.
Outside South Africa, the article concluded, Tabata continued to pursue the cause of
liberation “with the same indomitable spirit that sustained him through quarter of a
century of struggle in his home country”. The struggle for liberation was “his life”, and
it was “in the principles of the Movement” that one was able to “perceive the quality of
the man”. 107
Taylor’s biographic work, especially that done in the early‐to‐mid‐1960s represented the
most substantial mediation in the development of the idea of Tabata as an individual
104 Nosipho Majeke, ‘I.B. Tabata, President of the Unity Movement of South Africa for Full Democratic
Rights’ (1965), Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.
105 Nosipho Majeke, ‘I.B. Tabata, President of the Unity Movement of South Africa: For Full Democratic
Rights’ (1965), Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.
106 Nosipho Majeke, ‘I.B. Tabata, President of the Unity Movement of South Africa: For Full Democratic
Rights’ (1965), Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.
107 Nosipho Majeke, ‘I.B. Tabata, President of the Unity Movement of South Africa: For Full Democratic
Rights’ (1965), Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.
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