The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

created a topography of channels and networks between local leaders which cemented
political loyalties. The rural itinerary was a means of mapping and rerouting the Eastern
Cape through patterns of travel, and circuits of public education. Tabata’s political tours
were acts of paternalism and patronage, offering the political movement’s vision of
modernity and social order, replete with its categories and subject positions to be filled.
But as much as Tabata brought to the countryside, he also took away. These political
excursions were also like fieldtrips in the countryside, in which Tabata engaged in acts
of data collection on rural conditions and struggles. In affording the experience of
observation and documentation, these journeys were acts of social representation that
formed part of the process of modernity and the development of a sense of
individuality. 24 This documentation was assembled into the knowledge‐producing
world of the modernist political movement and placed into an evolutionary, progressist
discursive formation. These findings were then presented by Tabata back in Cape Town,
in report‐back meetings and published reports. 25 The Eastern Cape was made
‘knowable’ through Tabata’s cultural translation and mediation, within a spatial practice
of research that was part of an order of knowledge and public education whose main
base was in Cape Town. Readers in Cape Town were made to feel as if they were part of
a national movement that extended into a space of difference. Tabata mediated a
knowledge relationship and a programme of political unity that ironically reproduced
the frontier.
These contradictions were part of a process of imagining the nation and building a
movement through discourse. This saw the attempt to create a national subject through
the unifying categories of ‘African’ and ‘non‐European’. The process of “the awakening
of the people” involved “the rejection of … anonymity and a conscious process of self‐
24 See Peter D Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), p 3.
25 See for example the materials collected and data documented by Tabata on the struggles of the
AmaXesibe in the Mount Ayliff area against rehabilitation. See Statement by AmaXesibe, The Torch, 12
April 1948; I.B. Tabata, ‘The Story of the AmaXesibe’, The Torch, 26 April; 3 May & 10 May 1948. Drafts of
these materials are in the I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
446