The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

From around 1960, leaders of the Unity Movement found themselves at the head of a
regulatory and punitive formation which had begun to close ranks, to ‘guard its gates’
and to lay more emphasis on discipline. Relations of paternalism and patronage gave
way to the exercise of authority, with little room for internal disagreement and dissent.
Suspensions and expulsions were the chief mechanisms of creating political order, as
leaders and members were kept in line. The transition from collectivity and anonymity
to individuation and presidentialism was thus accompanied by the consolidation of
bureaucratic power in the movement, in which political initiatives and policy shifts
came decidedly from above. I.B. Tabata was the central figure in this power matrix, and
leaders like Sihlali exercised their presidential tasks in Tabata’s shadow. A key element
in these tensions was biographic. Just as I.B. Tabata’s life had become a biographic
project of the formation of heroic leadership and political wisdom, so the terms of its
narration began to be contested as younger activists attempted to make their mark
outside the boundaries of patronage and authority. In this biographic critique, the
trajectory of Tabata’s political life was deemed to have taken an autocratic turn, and
Tabata was depicted as a dictatorial leader who demanded loyalty and obedience.
After 1963, as the politics of presidentialism were acted out by Tabata in the exile
conditions of projecting the political movement and seeking political and financial
support, continued tensions and ruptures inside the movement could not be contained
by bureaucratic procedures. This time, Lusaka was the seat of a sustained, internal
biographic onslaught, with Tabata accused of being at the head of a clique that had
usurped power in the movement. The seemingly ordered image that had been projected
in the Lusaka studio photograph of an exiled leadership and family‐like structure that
had gathered in the city in 1965 (Figure 10) belied the internal tensions that had begun to
erupt. The key figure who unleashed a biographic attack on Tabata was Livingstone
Mqotsi, an activist described in 1953 as one of the movement’s ‘coming boys’ who had
clearly that “ADC funds should be used for anyone who is being persecuted for their activities in the
liberation movement and for their families. This, of course, includes organisers and others in the Unity
Movement”.
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