The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

education as well as mechanisms of person formation, where webs of meaning became
attached to forms of selfhood and subjectivity which, once held in a personally
committed way, were available to be redistributed and retransmitted.
I.B. Tabata was both producer and product in this system of knowledge production.
Apart from the political text and the political meeting, the device of the annual political
tour of the countryside represented a multifaceted method of nation‐building and
knowledge production. Tabata’s tours of the Transkei and eastern Cape in which he
took the ideas of NEUM to the rural areas were a spatial practice of political mediation
and knowledge transaction. Tabata was the bringer of political ideas and modernity
from Cape Town. Through these tours, which were conducted according to carefully
planned itineraries, the ‘national’ was mapped and landscaped as a relationship
between Cape Town and sites and localities in the Eastern Cape. The tours provided an
opportunity for relations of patronage to be exercised and spatialised through itineraries
in which Tabata travelled from place to place ‐ by bus, train, car and sometimes on
horseback ‐ in the Eastern Cape on visits facilitated by networks of local activists with
whom Tabata kept in regular contact. 23
The Eastern Cape was the prime locality of mobilisation into structures affiliated to the
AAC, especially around campaigns against betterment and the politics of native
representation during the 1940s. Through Tabata’s tours the AAC was also given a
national presence in the Eastern Cape. Through the itineraries, Tabata’s tours served to
connect villages and towns together, and his journeys from one local activist to the next
23 The I.B. Tabata Collection (BC 925) contains a wealth of material on the strategising, planning, logistics
and execution of these ‘tours’ of the Eastern Cape and other areas, on the webs of activists that sustained
them, as well as the follow‐up correspondence that was a vital part of sustaining networks of local
activists. See for example I.B. Tabata to D.D.T. Jabavu, 17 September 1945; I.B. Tabata to T. Sondlo, 17
September 1945; Tour Itinerary for October‐November 1946; Tour Itinerary for August‐September 1948;
I.B. Tabata to Z.R. Mahabane, 18 August 1948; I.B. Tabata to Mr Novukela (Mount Frere), 8 November
1948; I.B. Tabata to Mr Tutshana (Mount Ayliff), 17 November 1948, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
Perhaps one of the most instructive documents on the extent and nature of this network is a list of names
from Idutywa, Willowvale, Umtata, Tsolo, Qumbu, Mount Frere, Mount Ayliff, Pondoland East and
Kokstad, handed in as ‘Exhibit “G”’ at Tabata’s 1948 trial. See ‘Exhibit “G”’, Rex v Tabata, 1948, I.B.
Tabata Papers, BC 925.
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