The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

mobility for youth and other recipients and beneficiaries of Tabata’s patronage. What
were the possibilities and limits of the exercise of political initiative within this system of
authority and patronage? Tabata received reports during his banning from Leo Sihlali
on the progress of younger members of the movement, and on the development of their
“individual qualities and personalities”. Enver Hassim was “taking his proper place”
and, in spite of being someone who was “still unfolding”, was “developing a capacity to
absorb punches to the body”. In contrast, among the “‘Strong Men’ of the North”, the
movement had acquired its own “enfant terrible”. Vutela was emerging as someone
who could “drive physical fear into his opponent”. He had an impressive ability “to
maintain his sequence of thought even despite prolonged parentheses and digressions”
However, he was also “heartless [and] absolutely ruthless”, and his method was “to
trample on and destroy an adversary”. Sihlali reported that he was forced to take Vutela
aside and advise him “to make a distinction between the way of handling an enemy and
a comrade”. 46
Faced with the charge from Hosea Jaffe that his connections with youth and “his self‐
styled ‘friends’” were characterised by “self‐abasing idolatry”, 47 Tabata denied that
these relations of patronage were hierarchical and adulatory:
In my association with the youth in particular, my attitude
has always been to take into consideration their necessary
inexperience, but at all times to regard them as being on a
footing of equality, and my task has been to help them to
develop into men and women capable of independence of
thought. For it is only such youth who can carry a
movement forward. 48
In this exchange, Jaffe had also suggested that Tabata had been “regarded and treated as
a father‐confessor, sage or seer”, and that there was indeed a danger of the “idea of a
‘leader’” being embraced, in contrast to that of collective leadership that the movement
had “always … put forward”. The movement had done so, Jaffe had argued, “in a
46 Leo Sihlali to I.B. Tabata, 6 February 1957, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
47 Statement by Hosea Jaffe, 2 October 1956, I.B. Tabata Collection, BC 925.
48 I.B. Tabata to Chairman and Friends, 26 October 1956, I.B Tabata Collection, BC 925.
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