The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

elevant information from my research. In my interviews with Cissie’s sister‐in‐law,
Jane Gool about her student years at the Native College of Fort Hare, she had
explained that she and her sister Beida had insisted on going to Fort Hare after Cissie
had complained of discrimination at UCT. I enquired whether there was any
possibility that the planned plaza plaque might be able to explain this difficult past of
Cissie Gool’s connection with the university. In the end, it was the statistical fact of
UCT’s connection to a previously unacknowledged black woman leader that was the
cause of heritage inscription and not any difficult past that the university may have
wanted to turn its back on. In the end an opportunity for critical engagement with the
possibilities for biographic inscription were passed over in favour of heritage
celebration.
Finally, in my participation in the curatorial and research committee that created the
Digging Deeper exhibition that opened in the District Six Museum in 2000, I contributed
some of my research findings about I.B. Tabata’s political career in Cape Town, while
he had lived in the Stakesby Lewis Hostel, whose site was located two blocks away
from the Museum’s main building. I had donated copies of some of the photographs I
had collected to the Museum, including the 1941 Anne Fischer image given to me by
Jane Gool in the makeshift frame she had kept it in (Figure 6). While there was a
methodological accord between the curatorial intent of the portrait gallery and my
own emphases on more complex representation of life history, my research on the
relationship between I.B. Tabata and Dora Taylor directly influenced one element of
the design of a panel on resistance and cultural expression.
In working closely with one of the curators, Jos Thorne, I had explained my
understanding of what their relationship had been, and how formative Taylor had
been in Tabata’s biographic formation. I also mentioned that it seemed there had been
a deep, personal and emotional relationship that accompanied their political
connection. Drawing on my research, here was an opportunity, it seemed, to depict
lives and personages in more intricate ways, with attention to the intersections of their
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