The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

production of I.B. Tabata made a minimal direct impression on organised resistance
against apartheid inside South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. 109
Nevertheless, Taylor’s biographical texts on Tabata were also absorbed into the
collections of various libraries and archives in the United States, and formed the basis of
the profile of Tabata’s political life published in Karis and Carter. In the archive, Taylor’s
biographical work acquired the status of primary sources, where they were utilised by
historians as largely unmediated documents on the facts of Tabata’s political life. The
idea of Tabata as having a political biography was, in the main, the product of the
political labours and personal devotion of Dora Taylor. This idea was the outcome of a
decades‐long relationship in a borderland space of desire between the private and the
public, and the personal and the political. For much of its existence, this multifaceted
relationship was marked by intensity and mutuality, as each utilised the other as a
resource for their political and cultural production. The reciprocity of their relationship
was such that at critical points, it has been difficult to disentangle individual authorship
of ideas and writing from their commingling, in spite of public claims to individual
authorship.
From the early 1960s, as collectivity and anonymity had given way to individuation and
biography, Dora Taylor’s political ‘coming out’ and acquisition of formal status in the
movement represented an acknowledgement of her political work and commitment.
Tabata and Taylor experienced the excitement of public political engagement during
excursions to Algiers and Rome in 1962 and Cairo in 1964, as Taylor took her place in
her own name at Tabata’s side. They rekindled the thrill of travelling together for
political work in 1965, when Taylor once again took her place at Tabata’s side during
109 Under the influence of APDUSA activists such as Bobby Wilcox and Frank Anthony, who had been
released from Robben Island, an APDUSA structure that was loyal to Tabata and the external
leadership was reconstituted in Cape Town in the early 1980s.
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