The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Lusaka branch of APDUSA in December 1964, which raised funds, assisted Movement
refugees, held study groups, reproduced and distributed Movement literature, and
produced a monthly bulletin, APDUSA Newsletter. The newsletter had achieved
successes in its first few months, “receiving favourable comment” and “provoking
spirited discussion”. It was also “quoted … plagiarised and imitated in many quarters”,
and enabled “the voice” of the AAC and Unity Movement to be “heard” not only in
Africa but in the UK, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. 110
In the first few months of 1966, Mqotsi prepared a paper for a conference of African
liberation movements, which presented a case for building a “United Democratic
Movement of Africa”. The paper argued the case for the principled unity of African
liberation movements, a continental version of the Unity Movement that would have its
own Ten Point Programme, adhere to “a policy of non‐collaboration with imperialism
and its agents” and be federal in structure. It is not clear whether this conference took
place, but the article was published in the April 1966 APDUSA Newsletter that Mqotsi
edited. 111 Immediately thereafter, Tabata and Jane Gool, “his personal representative” in
Lusaka caused the “immediate stoppage” of production and circulation of the
newsletter after five issues and “instigat[ed] the banning” of the Lusaka APDUSA
branch. 112
According to Mqotsi, “the prospect of such continental unity” as proposed by the
newsletter, “must have frightened the bureaucrats out of their heads”. With such unity,
the Unity Movement may have found itself “in danger of being called upon to unite
110 The Chairman of the Branch of APDUSA in Zambia – since disestablished to All Members of the
National Executive of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa, May 1966, Livingstone
Mqotsi Papers. I would like to thank Livingstone Mqotsi for giving me access to copies of this and other
papers dealing with these conflicts in the Unity Movement in Lusaka.
111 ‘Towards a United Democratic Movement of Africa’, APDUSA Newsletter, Vol II, No 4, April 1966.
Mqotsi was careful to point out on the back cover that this article was not issued by the APDUSA
National Executive. I would like to thank Livingstone Mqotsi for giving me copies of this newsletter and
its successors between April 1966 and January‐February 1968.
112 The Chairman of the Branch of APDUSA in Zambia – since disestablished to All Members of the
National Executive of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa, May 1966; ‘An
Indictment of I.B. Tabata and his Clique’ (Framed and endorsed by members of the Unity Movement in
Lusaka), Lusaka, 19 September 1966, Livingstone Mqotsi Papers.
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