Making and Challenging a Biographic Order: National Longing, Political Belonging and the Politics of Affect in a South African Liberation Movement

Abstract

Notwithstanding its commitment to collective leadership, this chapter shows how growing patterns of paternalism and patronage emerged in the Unity Movement, that marked intergenerational relations and the exercise of leadership. Based upon archives of political documents, private diaries and personal memory, this article examines rituals of political expression, membership and belonging in a liberation movement, considered through the metaphors of the family and the school. It shows how a transition from collective leadership to presidentialism occurred in the Unity Movement and its constituent bodies that saw the creation of a biographic order of paternalism and patronage. The biography of Isaac Bangani Tabata became part of a system of containment and discipline, with forms of biographic dissent also unleashed, with Tabata’s leadership called into question.