The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

The final entry of Tabata’s body into the topography of the Eastern Cape signalled the
fragility of presidentialist narrations of his biography and raised questions about the
terms upon which Tabata’s biography was to be understood. This fragility was
reproduced as marginality in the APDUSA office in Salt River in 2002. At the same time,
these questions were addressed in archives and museums as I.B. Tabata entered the
realm of memory. The collection that passed into the archives of UCT and Fort Hare
represented a final effort on the part of Tabata’s supporters to ensure his entry into the
official institutions of history and heritage. Ironically that very collection was not able to
contain the histories of its own creation and mediation, and the extent to which it is has
been possible to understand the politics and relations of knowledge in the production of
Isaac Bangani Tabata.
Dora Taylor may have sacrificed her own literary work in the service of Tabata’s
political biography. However, her mediations ensured that the Tabata collection
represented a biography of their relationship of politics, culture and intimacy, and that it
was not possible to understand Tabata’s life adequately without considering their long
relationship. In placing Tabata’s image alongside Taylor’s, the District Six Museum has
chosen to reflect upon I.B. Tabata’s life history in ways that seek to transcend linear,
masculinist conventions of narration and realist frameworks of recovery. It has shown
through a focus on biographical relations that political lives can indeed be understood as
productions.
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