The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

leader of the Unity Movement with a significant political biography. Taylor’s biographic
profiles and articles about Tabata, produced as part of the quest for funds and material
support from international sources, were absorbed into the literature of the movement
and acquired canonical status alongside Tabata’s writings. Initiatives to republish
Tabata’s works were accompanied by Taylor’s narrative of Tabata’s life. 108 The resistance
narrative that these biographic texts conveyed was the product of the long history of
mutual biographic conversations between Tabata and Taylor, and particularly of their
co‐authored first‐person text. This biographic stage was also partly the product of a
longer history of individuation that had emerged out of Tabata’s history of writing and
authorship. And this transition from biographic aversion to biographic narration was
also depicted through the lens of the camera as collective leadership gave way to
presidentialism.
From the 1960s, the auto/biographical narrative of Tabata’s life seeped into the veins of
the movement, with concealed aspects of underground Trotskyist activism added when
conditions allowed. Veneration of Tabata and knowing the biographical narrative of his
political contribution became a vital element of political commitment within the
structures of UMSA. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a presidential politics of an exiled
national movement, centred on Tabata’s leadership and a biographically constructed
sense of greatness, was consolidated. This coincided with the movement’s increasing
dislocation from political structures inside South Africa, under the impact of heightened
levels of state repression. As a consequence, all the work of biographic mediation and
108 The result of all this effort was the unpublished manuscript, which sought to republish a range of
Tabata’s writings as a coherent whole, and that was edited by Dora Taylor, who also wrote the
introduction. UWC graduate student and Cape Town activist, André Marais, who had found the
manuscript on a street with a pile of other papers, passed it on to me. See Dora Taylor (ed), The
Dynamic of Revolution in South Africa: Speeches and Writings by I.B. Tabata (Unpublished manuscript,
c.1969, in author’s possession). In 1971, Dora Taylor also sought to turn her introduction to this
unpublished text into a separate pamphlet, whose focus was extended to include a report on the
arrests of APDUSA members in 1971. This document was also found by Marais and passed on to me.
See Nosipho Majeke, ‘The Dynamic of Revolution in South Africa’, Unpublished pamphlet, 1971
(author’s possession).
432