I.B. Tabata

Isaac Bangani Tabata (known as I.B. Tabata) was born near Queenstown in the Cape in 1909 and received his secondary schooling at Lovedale. After attending Fort Hare for some time he left the university to seek work in Cape Town in 1931. He became employed as a truck driver and joined the racially mixed Lorry Drivers’ Union, serving as a member of its executive. He joined the Cape African Voters’ Association and educated himself politically by reading widely in Marxist and other radical literature. He was one of the founders of the Anti-C.A.D. group and was active in the NEUM from its inception in 1943. In the 1940s he traveled widely in the Cape and the Transkei, publicising the NEUM programme and attacking government programmes aimed at limiting African livestock. The Xhosa version of his pamphlet, The Rehabilitation Scheme — A Fraud, circulated widely at this time. Contemptuous of the ANC and the CPSA, Tabata favoured a peasant-based liberation movement and a long-range strategy of political education rather than short-range action campaigns. In June 1952, just as the ANC’s Defiance Campaign was beginning, he published a new pamphlet, Boycott as a Weapon of Struggle, putting forth the case for his own approach and that of the NEUM. In 1956 he received banning orders confining him to Cape Town for five years, during which time he wrote Education for Barbarism, a pamphlet attacking the Bantu Education system. On the expiration of his ban in 1961, he helped found the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa, which was intended to be an individual-membership body affiliated to the AAC and the NEUM, and became its president. In May 1963 he fled South Africa via Swaziland and subsequently took refuge in Zambia. In 1965 and again in 1970 he made speaking tours of the United States. During his period of exile he continued to hold the position of president of both the NEUM (now called the Unity Movement of South Africa) and APDUSA. In addition to the writings cited, he wrote a collection of essays, Imperialist Conspiracy in Africa (1974).