The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

clubs, youth societies and vigilance associations, many of which belonged to
overarching structures such as the Transkei Organised Bodies (TOB), and which came to
be affiliates of the AAC and the Unity Movement.
Tabata maintained constant contact with these cadres, offering his guidance and
counsel, keeping up morale, boosting confidence and ensuring that political principles
were applied in the work of mobilisation on a federal basis. These were the tasks of
internal cadre management in different regions and of ensuring a system of mentorship
for younger activists in the movement. Tabata also developed and sustained relations of
counsel, guidance and persuasion with a range of younger activists outside the fold of
the AAC and the Unity Movement during the 1940s, as more radical possibilities for
black political expression began to crystallise. Sometimes these internal and external
relations involved either paternalism or patronage on Tabata’s part, and sometimes,
they incorporated both. While paternalism entailed a relation of tutorship or mentorship
across generation, patronage involved a relation across different hierarchies of power,
authority and resources.
These relations of paternalism and patronage constituted the lived political associations
through which I.B. Tabata constituted and carried out the position of leader. These were
also where the constituent elements of his biography were assembled and fashioned: of
selfless resistance, commanding oratory, matchless authorial capacity and
unquestionable fortitude in the face of repression. The political structures in which these
relations were exercised and performed were marked by the simultaneous,
contradictory elements of adherence to collective leadership and political principle on
the one hand, and the production and observation of individual charisma and forms of
loyalty, on the other. Through relations of paternalism and patronage, Tabata exercised
political leadership as an individual who was part of a collective. These relations were
also biographical and the narrative of Tabata’s life came to stand as the model for
younger members to emulate. Later, Tabata’s biography became part of a system of
organisational discipline – a biographic order –which had the consequence of
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