The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

CHAPTER EIGHT
TAKING THE NATION TO SCHOOL: NARRATIVE AND COUNTER‐
NARRATIVE IN THE PRODUCTION AND CONTESTATION OF I.B.
TABATA’S BIOGRAPHY
The rise of presidentialism in the 1960s and its emergence as a kind of cult in the
organisational practice of a movement in decline needs to be understood in the context
of relations of paternalism and patronage that characterised the Unity Movement,
notwithstanding the assertion of collective leadership. This seeming incongruity
emerged out of the defining features of the AAC and the Unity Movement. The
movement, as it emerged in the 1940s and developed in the 1950s, was in some ways
marked by a family structure, but in a more significant way took on the features of a
school. And just as schools have been spaces of enablement and enlightenment, they
have also simultaneously been institutions of discipline and constraint. The contests and
challenges over I.B. Tabata’s leadership that erupted in the movement in South Africa in
the 1950s and in Lusaka in the 1960s emerged out of these ambiguities and
contradictions. The accusations of leadership cults and autocratic leadership were
simultaneously contests over I.B. Tabata’s biography and the terms of its narration.
Significant biographic contests over Tabata’s life and the terms of its narration occurred
at his funeral in Lesseyton in the Eastern Cape in 1990 and at the unveiling of the
headstone of his grave in 1995. Tabata’s funeral was meant to be a process of
repatriation of a secular political leader, albeit of a political movement whose time had
passed. The burial and funeral sought to reconnect Tabata’s with the soil of his Eastern
Cape birthplace, while the stone unveiling attempted to mark the significance of
Tabata’s grave. At these events, biographic narrations, which were centred on familial
and indigenous Christian elements, and connected to the landscape and a longer rural
history, demanded a space of expression alongside the biographic lessons in secular
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