The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

political work in the movement, in many ways, continued to be an expression of
selflessness and sacrifice as loyalty to the cause of liberation increasingly became
defined as loyalty to Tabata. More than anyone, Taylor performed this duty
unquestioningly with diligence and devotion.
Perhaps the most significant biographical tribute to Tabata that Taylor constructed was
the archival collection that entered the University of Cape Town from 1989. This archive,
constituting the foremost biographic ordering of Tabata’s life, was the product of Dora
Taylor’s duty and service to the cause of the movement and I.B. Tabata. The collection
was not merely a chronological assemblage of the traces of Tabata’s political career.
More than a mere repository, it bore the traces of a range of interventions, mediations
and processes of production. And the primary form of mediation (and even authorship)
that left its mark on almost every feature of this collection was the efforts of Dora Taylor.
Subsequent interventions by UMSA activists in Britain, such as the work that Ronnie
Britten did in preparing documents for mailing to UCT, 113 were not able to wipe away
the primary mark of Dora Taylor, nor the extent to which the collection is a biography of
Tabata and Taylor’s relationship of intensity. Through the constitution of these papers as
a collection in a university archive, Taylor’s mediations and her and Tabata’s
relationship of politics, culture and intimacy found a place in the academy and the
institutions of public culture. It might indeed be more appropriate that the collection be
thought of as the Tabata‐Taylor Collection.
relationship that Tabata continued to have with Taylor. And because the attractions and emotions in
Tabata and Taylor’s relationship continued to extend beyond political comradeship, I think Gool had
put her foot down and prevented Taylor from moving to Lusaka. These tensions were confirmed in
unrecorded conversations with Jane Gool in 1993.
113 It was Ronnie Britten, who undertook the task of preparing and sending documents to UCT
between 1988 and 1994. Taylor had been in charge of the files until her death in the mid‐1970s. This
“repatriation” first began anonymously, with Britten using the name, B Johns, and included materials
from a final foray he made in 1993 into the Taylor Papers, which her daughter, Doreen Muskett kept in
Duntish, England. The materials that Britten borrowed found their way into the Tabata Collection and
were never returned to Muskett. There is an extensive correspondence in the Tabata Collection
between B Johns/Ronnie Britten and Margaret Richards of UCT between 1988 and 1994 about the
logistics, delivery and sorting of the Tabata Papers. At the time that Britten was doing this work, Jane
Gool suggested to me that in discharging the onus of Tabata’s promise in his 1987 letter to Francis
Wilson, Britten had perhaps taken on an inappropriate “mantle of leadership” (Jane Gool, personal
communication, 1994).
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