The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

After the residents of Lesseyton had fought against incorporation into the Transkei
Bantustan in the 1980s, what was left of the Tabata farm, the remains of ‘Xuma’ had
become completely run down by the 1990s. The farmhouse had been reduced to rubble
and little more than the ruins of its foundations were visible, amid a desperately poor
informal settlement. In spite of the declining Bailey fortunes of the Tabata family and its
gradual dispersal, their long presence in the Bailey‐Lesseyton area was attested to by the
fact that the local river was officially known as the Tabata River and that the area itself
had become known colloquially as ‘KwaTabata’. The Tabata family graveyard at the foot
of Lesseyton village where Tabata was laid to rest was part of this landscape marked by
the Tabata family’s past and an agricultural history of prosperity and decline, and of
removal and rural impoverishment. The family’s membership of the Order of Ethiopia
was part of this history.
The tensions that emerged at the funeral between the political and the religious did not
take the form of open struggles. Instead, it can be argued that the Order’s prominence in
the Tabata funeral proceedings and the entry of Christian codes as a means of
remembering Tabata and marking his life and death were a measure of the extent of
UMSA’s organisational weakness. At the funeral, UMSA did not have the strength to
contain the narrative boundaries of Tabata’s biography. In 1995, Tabata’s grave was
given a monumental gravestone after a ceremony that had been marked by the same
ambiguities ‐ of secularism and religiosity, and politics and Christianity ‐ as the funeral
itself. The gravestone proclaimed to the public that Tabata had been “a great politician,
president of the Unity Movement of South Africa and a great man”. But this was no
heroes’ acre. No matter how strongly the gravestone tried to declare and fix a
representation of I.B. Tabata’s public greatness, his remains ultimately lay in an
unassuming family cemetery alongside the graves of his brothers and sisters and parents
on what may have been an old road to nowhere. 170
170 For a discussion of cemeteries as sites of public history and private mourning, see Jay Ruby, Secure the
Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1995), pp 141‐142.
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