The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Almost unexpectedly, at his funeral in October 1990, a Christian, religious element made
itself felt alongside the socialist and the secular political. After clergy in the Queenstown
area had expressed their reluctance to officiate due to Tabata’s political profile, two
ministers came in from Port Elizabeth. While Tabata’s body was with the Queenstown
undertakers, services and prayers had been held every evening for the whole week
leading up to the funeral. It was the ministers who opened the funeral proceedings with
a prayer, after which hymns were sung. Then “the political side” started with speeches
and songs. Most of the mourners were local Lesseyton members of the church. “When
all that was finished, the religion took over”. When the time had come for the procession
to the cemetery, the proceedings were conducted through religious ritual. For Sarah
Magdalene Tabata, there was no contradiction in this. Her late brother‐in‐law had been
brought up in a religious home. He may have declared as a young person that he was
“going forth to fight for [his] people”. But it was very important that the home
“support[ed] him with prayers”. Moreover, “the struggle ha[d] a lot to do with
religion”. 162
But in some ways, the prominence and assuredness of the religious at I.B. Tabata’s
funeral was surprising. The funerals of Ben Kies and Victor Wessels in Cape Town in the
1970s had been strictly secular and political, in keeping with the atheism of the
deceased. The same had been the case with Leo Sihlali whose funeral took place in the
Mount Frere Municipal Hall, since no church was available and a local priest had
refused to officiate. It was suggested that this absence of religious funery mediation was
appropriate for Sihlali, who had been “an unrepentant Marxist and an uncompromising
revolutionary”. Also, Tabata’s entry into the socialist movement in the 1930s in Cape
Town had been expressly bound up with a turn away from religion and the concept of
God. Both Cadoc Kobus, who had also joined the WPSA, and Ernest Mancoba, who had
spent time with Tabata in Cape Town in the 1930s, and who had sold copies of the
162 Ciraj Rassool, Interview with Sarah Magdalene Tabata, Lesseyton, 12 July 1995, assisted by Ayanda
Bashe.
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