The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

game. That was what it amounted to. The massive
pretence!” 144
At headquarters in Harare, in the presence of his revolutionary hero,
Comrade B found instead the “tranquil existence” of people who had
“learned to live peacefully with failure”. “The dynamism which had
been his hallmark, the glitter of his personality, were gone”. 145
In their encounter, Comrade Chair had held forth “for an eternity about his personal
heroics, some quarter of a century past”. The past “was something special to him”, and
after Comrade B had related what had happened to him, Comrade Chair “broke straight
into a story of his own”. Comrade B heard “the expansiveness of his gesture and
listened to the grandeur of his delivery”. There seemed “something prepared about it
all”, he thought. Comrade Chair’s story “had happened more than two decades before,
yet he recalled with great facility the minutest detail”. This was “not reminiscence, it
was oral autobiography”. There was “no future in what he told”. It was “all past,
solidified and final”. Writing later, Jane Gool’s reaction to Anthony’s “strange and
disturbing” book was that it was “an exorcism of a mind plagued and tormented by a
host of sick visions”. 146 However, Anthony’s biographic rejection of Tabata represented
the most intense dismissal of the encrusted legend of a leader, a painful realisation of the
extent of mythology’s hollowness and delusion, and of the fact that the emperor indeed
had no clothes.
Burying, mourning and remembering Tabata
When Anthony’s book was published, I.B. Tabata was already dead. He had died in
Harare on 13 October 1990 after a long illness. The cause of his death was listed as
“cardio‐respiratory failure”. 147 In his last few days, his illness had become quite acute,
144 Frank Anthony, The Journey, p 184.
145 Frank Anthony, The Journey, p 189.
146 Frank Anthony, The Journey, pp 188‐189; Jane Gool, ‘Critique on The Journey by Frank Anthony, 24
April 1991.
147 Notice of Death of Isaac Bangani Tabata (in terms of the Births and Deaths Registration Act,
Zimbabwe), 15 October 1990 (author’s possession). I am indebted to Magdalene Tabata, I.B. Tabata’s late
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