To engage Isaac B. Tabata as a historical figure is to be confronted with the question of Trotskyism in the context of South African modernity. Tabata is among those few New African intellectuals who correctly analysed that modernity and Marxism were inseparable from each other. The largest contingent of intellectuals and political leaders of the New African Movement (including Solomon T. Plaatje, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Nelson Mandela, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Harold Cressy) situated African Nationalism as inherently in dialectical unity with modernity, rather than with Marxism, as other members of the Movement such as A. C. Jordan, Ben Kies, Ruth First, Yusuf Dadoo had postulated. Within Marxism itself, there was disagreement between those like I. B. Tabata and Ben Kies who thought the Trotskyist variant much more synchronous with modernity, and those like Yusuf Cachalia and Michael Harmel who belived the Stalinist variant much more diachronically in harmony with modernity. In the main, Tabata practised his Trotskyism as an interventionist instrument in facilitating the bridges of political unification among the organisations fighting against the oppression of the working class and the African people in South Africa. This is the reason he was present at the founding of two organisations that attempted to forge a unity among the oppressed across racial and class boundaries: the All-African Convention (AAC) in 1935; and the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in 1943, late known as Unity Movement of South Africa (UM). In a Letter of 1948 to Nelson Mandela, who was then the National Secretary of the ANC Youth League, criticizing what he perceived to be the collaborationist posture of the ANC parent organization, Tabata indicated what the fundamental task had been in the founding of the AAC: “The African People spontaneously created the ALL-AFRICAN CONVENTION. The political exigencies of the time and the crisis (of the new [Hertzog] slave Bills) forced the people to organise on a nation-wide scale. So without any premeditated theory the people spontaneously gave birth to a form of organisation which could knit together a whole people into a single compact unit, a fighting force. The predominant idea at the time was unity. This was one higher political level. The predominant thought in everyone’s mind was how to remove competition and eliminate all rivalry between the organisations. Each leader was to bring his followers to this body and he together with leaders of other organisations was to form a single leadership with a common aim and a common purpose. The interests of each constituent part were identical with the interests of the whole. Mutual antagonisms and rivalry were replaced by the spirit of co-operation. The leader who jealously guarded his personal position was replaced by a unified leadership and petty sectional considerations gave way to a form of thought which embraced the whole race. This was a turning point in the organisational history of the African people. That is, 1935-36 was the highest point in organisation affecting the African people as a group” (The Carter-Karis Archival Documents, emphasis in the original). It would seem that I. B. Tabata believed that the principle of permanent revolution fundamental to Trotskyism to be the political instrument through which the oppressed people of South Africa could be forged into unity in the process of political struggle. In his 1962 Presidential Address to the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA, a political organisation launched in 1961 as a unifying instrument following the Sharpeville Massacre of the previous year) Tabata designates and posits the working class as the historical unifier of the disparate structural locations of oppressed peoples: “When capitalism is faced with an acute crisis it tends to move towards a totalitarian dictatorship. But a totalitarian regime of the fascist type is a condition of an unstable regime. But its very essence it can only temporary and transitional. Naked dictatorship is a symptom of a severe social crisis. And society cannot exist permanently under a state of crisis. A totalitarian state is capable of suppressing social contradictions during a certain period but is incapable of perpetuating itself. A ruling class, like a wounded lion becomes more vicious as it feels itself drawing near to its extinction. The more vicious it becomes, the more monstrous become the laws against the oppressed, the greater grows its sense of insecurity. The very condition of an acute social crisis means that the forces operating in society can no longer be accomodated within it. It is time to change the old social relationship. Only that class that is called upon to do so, by virtue of its historical role, can help to solve such a crisis. . . . We believe that only that class which has a historical future can lead society out of the crisis. History has placed the destiny of our society in the hands of the toiling masses. If we are to succeed in out task of liberation, we must link ourselves dynamically and inseparably with the labouring classes. Without them we are nothing. With them we are everything, and nothing can stand in our way. No power on earth can hold us back in our march” (Apartheid: Cosmetics Exposed, 1986). During these formulations, the Unity Movement was undergoing its recurrent fragmentations, as can be gleaned from an anonymously written article in the Drum issue of March 1960: “In its prospectus, the N. E. U. M. offered itself as a political body which would serve the needs of the people. . . But early in 1959 the N. E. U. M. split wide open. The A. A. C., led by Mr. I Tabatha, broke clean away. . . Benny Kies was left holding the fort. He is extremely able, but dogmatic. . . It appeared that Mr. Tabatha had become dissatisfied with the ‘inactivity’ which was becoming a feature of the N. E. U. M. Discomforted by the more forceful lead of the A. N. C., he felt the A. A. C. should do more to justify its existence, and accused the N. E. U. M. of too much theorising and too little action. There was also a dispute with Kies over a question of land policy” (“The Unity Movement: Where Can It Lead Us?”). Within a few years of his break with Ben Kies, I. B. Tabatha went to exile in 1963 to Zambia through Swaziland. Since also Jordan Kush Ngubane went to exile in 1963 by means of Swaziland, it is interesting what this virulent anti-Communist to the ardent Communist. That both men were thinkers with original minds, is beyond dispute. It is the kind of intellectual dispute they exemplified that made the New African Movement the vital force it was in the first half of the twentieth-century and the lasting effects it has had in the second half of the century. Another contrast could easily be sketched between the Trotskyism of I. B. Tabata and the Stalinism of Govan Mbeki since both of them never yielded from their conviction that the peasant class was the most revolutionary instrument for unifying the country: one postulating this position during the 27-year exile period and the other during his 25-year imprisonment. This also exemplifies the resiliency of the Movement in the twentieth-century. Without I. B. Tabata centrally and intellectually located in its dialectical progression, our cultural history would be incomprehensible.