by
Ntongela Masilela

We here in this country admire your work a great
deal, and so it made me very happy indeed to
receive from Victor Gollancz, Ltd., a copy of the
very kind and generous letter which you wrote to
Mrs. Sheila Hodges regarding SIMPLE TAKES A
WIFE. I am so glad you like SIMPLE and greatly
appreciated your taking the time and trouble to
say so.

-Langston Hughes, Letter of January 9, 1954 to Peter Abrahams.

I still recall most vividly the emotions with which, as a
semi-literate youngster in Johannesburg , I first came
across your work many years ago in Alain Locke's
NEW NEGRO anthology. That discovery made all the
difference in the world to my life. . .

-Peter Abrahams, Letter of January 12, 1954 to Langston Hughes.

Peter Abrahams (1918- ) is one of the pivotal figures in the intellectual history of the New African Movement in South Africa from Harold Cressy (1889-1916) to Lewis Nkosi(1936- ). His historic importance resides in several achievements and actualizations.

First, he demarcates the shift of influence of New Negro modernity within New African modernity from Politics, Philosophy and Religion to Literature, Music and Entertainment. Concretely, the impact of Alexander Crummell on Xhosa Intellectuals of the 1880s (Elijah Makiwane [1850-1928], John Tengo Jabavu [1859-1921], Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba [1850-1911], Walter Benson Rubusana [1858-1936] and others) was on matters concerning the political philosophy of modernity, whereas that of Langson Hughes on some the Zulu Intellectuals of the 1940s (particularly on H. I. E. Dhlomo [1903-1956], Benedict Wallet Bambatha Vilakazi [1906-1947], Walter M. B. Nhlapo [?-?] more than on Jordan Kush Ngubane [1917-1985] and others) was on literary representation in modernity. Richard Wright's exemplary nature to the Sophiatown Renaissance (Ezekiel Mphahlele [1919- ], Richard Rive [1931-1989], Bloke Modisane [1924-1986] and others) could be mentioned here. R. V. Selope Thema (1886-1955) in the pages of Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1920s and those of the The Bantu World in the 1930s analyzed the conceptual patterns of these shifting influences from Philosophy to Culture.

Second, Peter Abrahams' engagement with literary matters initiated by the publication of his poetry by R. V. Selope Thema in the pages of The Bantu World in 1936 was the beginning of the hegemony of the African literature in the English language over African literature in the African languages within the New African Movement, and naturally by extension, within South African literary history. To be sure, this imposition of the hegemonic order was political rather than based on purely literary criteria, in spite of the correct acknowledgement that politics and literary matters are deeply intertwined. S. E. K. Mqhayi (1875-1945), the extraordinary Xhosa poet, was the dominant South African poet in the first half of the twentieth century; the second half was to be dominated by Mazisi Kunene (1930- ), the great Zulu poet. In 1936, while Selope Thema as editor of the newspaper, was launching the literary career of Abrahams in the English-language portion of the weekly, Guybon Bundlwana Sinxo (1902-1962), the distinguished Xhosa novelist and short story writer, and sub-editor of the Xhosa section of The Bantu World , was publishing poems from the final phase of the poet known as [Jikelele--------------,”National Poet”]. From William Wellington Gqoba (1840-1888), the first modern Xhosa poet within the Xhosa Intellectuals of the 1880s and the last editor of Isigidimi Sama Xosa (The Xhosa Messenger) through Mqhayi to Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, African poetry in the African languages reigned supreme. One would have expected H. I. E. Dhlomo to begin the shift rather than Peter Abrahams, if no other reason than because of seniority. But in the 1930s Dhlomo was preoccupied with his English language plays as well as with his brilliant essays, having begun his intellectual career in the 1920s in Umteteli wa Bantu (The Mouthpiece of the People) with journalism. It was in the 1940s, when H. I. E. Dhlomo became assistant editor of Ilanga lase Natal , under the editorialship of his senior brother R. R. R. Dhlomo (1901-1971), the Zulu historical novelist, that he began publishing his poetry in English extensively in the pages of the weekly. Clearly then, the auspicious literary debut of Peter Abrahams in poetic form was more determinant by exogenous factors rather than endogenous ones, among the most important being that the fact that S. E. K. Mqhayi had already entered his autumnal years and Mazisi Kunene was not to pronounce and establish his prodigiousness for another thirty years. In this interregnum everything became allowable.

Although William Wellington Gqoba wrote a few poems in English in Isigidimi Sama Xhosa in the context of the abundance of his Xhosa poetry, while also extending and deepening the Xhosa essay form in the tradition of Tiyo Soga (1829-1871) and Elijah Makiwane, this intervention was not be consequential as that of Peter Abrahams. Although too Isaac William Wauchope (1845-1917) was to write the first anti-colonial poems in the English language among the Xhosa Intellectuals of the 1880s in Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion) in the 1890s, yet too this productivity was not to be devastating in the history of poetic form in South Africa . Wauchope was introduced to the African and to the Africa diasporan world through his landmark poem, “Fight with the Pen“ (1882) which was assembled in Langston Hughes' anthology African Treasury (1960). Perhaps the reason for the absence of the rupturing effect of the poetry of Gqoba and Wauchope's on the historical divide between tradition and modernity was that despite its “Englishness”, it still strongly resonated with the poetic logic of izibongo . It is possible that Peter Abrahams was able to effect this rupturing he brought a particular literary modernity to the literary battles within the New African Movement. It is necessary to recollect that the literary triumvirate of H. I. E. Dhlomo, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi and Peter Abrahams brought, for different reasons, with non-synchronous temporality as well for discordant purposes, the poetics of the Romanticism of Blake, Shelley, Keats and Company, to the literary culture of the New African intelligentsia. This was similar to what had occurred a decade earlier in the 1920s in New York within the Harlem Renaissance when Langston Hughes advocating and practicing the poetics of jazz and the blues stood steadfastly against Countee Cullen's importation of the poetics of Romanticism into the developing New Negro literary modernity. When Peter Abraham's in his travel reportage Return to Egoli (1953) recalled fondly his intellectual friendship with H. I. E. Dhlomo, in all probability he was remembering their days together in The Bantu World in the 1930s, when many of these literary matters gestated, given credence and practiced, before Peter Abrahams embarked on a self-imposed exile in 1939. There can be no doubt that R. V. Selope Thema was the godfather of these literary manifestations since his fundamental mission in the political and intellectual history of the New African Movement was to make modernity triumph in South Africa practically at any cost.

What distinguished the peculiarity of Peter Abrahams, perhaps defining his foresight, beyond the mutual position he had with H. I. E. Dhlomo and Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, was his appropriation of the literary modernism of New Negro modernity for the forging of new literary horizons within New African modernity. The uniqueness of Abrahams was defined by the unstable conjuction of the literary modernism of New Negro modernity and the literary modernity of Romanticism. This leads directly to the third item concerning him. It would seem that upon embarking on his exile, which was to prove permanent, today in January 2004 residing in Jamaica since 1957, Abrahams jettisoned his poetic form in preference for prose. The only literary book to published in South Africa by him was a book of poetry. In England , in the early 1940s, he published a collection of short stories Dark Testament (1942) and his first novel Song of the City (1943). Arguably, the most important influence on this prose at this time was Richard Wright's collection of short stories Uncle Thom's Children (1938) and his major novel Native Son (1940). The distinctiveness of Richard Wright within New Negro modernity was that, whereas Langston Hughes in his literary manifeso “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) with the Harlem Renaissance called for a new black literary aesthetic predicated on the poetics of the blues and jazz, his literary manifesto “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937), written outside this cultural movement and in opposition to it, argued that authentic proletarian black aesthetics can only emerge from African American folklore. Wright sought to criticize the Harlem Renaissance from a class position. It was this class position he sought to portray through naturalism/realism in his novel. Peter Abrahams sought to realize a similar poetics of realism in his proletarian novel Mine Boy (1946?). It is the realism of literary modernity in the novel that makes it a durable work of art within the New African Movement, surpassing the first novel written in English by an African, Solomon T. Plaatje's Mhudi (1930, although written in 1920), that was a combination of the pastoral and the fantastic. Though realized by the means of the principles of literary modernity, Mine Boy fails because it ignores and obfuscates the literary devices of literary modernism. Its durability is also accounted for by its attempt to articulate the ideologies of Marxism and Pan-Africanism as the preeminent political philosophies of modernity in Africa and in the African Diaspora. This philosophy of Pan-Africanism came directly from across the Atlantic .

Fourth, it this ideology Pan-Africanism, brought to South Africa by the great Ghanian intellectual F. Z. S. Peregrino (1851-1919) in 1900 and disseminate it in the pages of his newspaper South African Spectator (1900-1912) in Cape Town , therefore in the whole of South Africa, that enabled Peter Abrahams to find his historical bearings in his intellectual and political engagements with the African Diaspora between the Manchester Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945 and the Paris First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in 1956. The intellectual exchanges between Richard Wright and Peter Abrahams in the late 1940s and in the early 1950s regarding the consequential nature of African modernity was really about the meaning of Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora in contrast to its contextual location in Africa . In an unforeseen way, but dialectically understandable, Peter Abrahams' opening to the African Diaspora was an enabler of a young South African poet and intellectual Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938- ) to the full membership of the American Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, having been too young to participate in the Sophiatown Renaissance and/or the Drum writers of the 1950s.

In arriving in London in 1939 at the age of twenty-one Peter Abrahams could not have anticipated the maelstrom of black modernity he was about to enter. The cosmopolitanism with which he engaged himself in this great city was the one that expressed and articulated its historical moment as the indissoluble unity of Marxism and modernity. But this unity articulated within the intellectual forums of the British Communist Party proved problematic in its understanding of literary modernism. This was what led to Abrahams break with the Party as well as with Marxism in the early 1940s. Also at the same time but in Chicago , Richard Wright broke with American Communist Party and Marxism concerning literary matters. This break with Marxism and the search for an alternative political philosophy in the early 1940s was what characterized a deep affinity between them that resulted in the intimate political and intellectual friendship in the late 1940s and in the early 1950s. Their intellectual discussions in the decade of the 1950s was informed by a search for the nature of political modernity that would best be suitable to the historical imperatives of Africa . But interestingly, they chose different political philosophies to replace Marxism: Peter Abrahams embraced Pan-Africanism while Richard Wright resident in Paris aligned himself with Existentialism. At the same time that Abrahams and Wright were making their particular philosophic shifts, George Padmore renounced Marxism and in order to re-inventing Pan-Africanism as a philosophy of black modernity while in the process of switching his location from Moscow to London. His break was necessitated by political matters: he refused to acquiesce to Stalin's demands that he temper his unrelenting criticism of British colonialism and imperialism as part of the cost in the rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Britain concerning Nazi Germany. While Abrahams and Padmore were drifting towards London from different directions, C. L. R. James while resident in the city was forging a synthesis between Marxism and Pan-Africanism through Trotskyism. James and Paul Robeson's collaboration in establishing the International African Bureau Service and the International African Opinion were part of this complex undertaking of inventing the uniqueness of black political modernity. Of course Marcus Garvey was the indomitable force of Garveyism living in London before his death there in 1940.

It was the constellation of these major African and diasporan intellectuals as well as their philosophic subjectivities that made London in the 1940s the formidable cauldron of political modernity that it was. This conjuncture of political and intellectual force fields enabled George Padmore to organize the historic 1945 Manchester Fifth Pan-African Congress. Padmore assembled the resolutions, some of the presentations and the name of the participants in a document of singular importance: History of the Pan- African Congress (1947). Peter Abrahams was one of the delegates whose participation and activity was central to the success of the Congress. Not only does Padmore thank him, among others, in assisting in the publication of the booklet of the proceedings, a careful reading of the document clearly shows that Abrahams was one of the crucial organizers of the conference, he was one of the central participants whose presentation and that of W. E. B. Du Bois are the ones produced verbatim in the document. Their presentations facilitated a historical context and a political perspective for the Congress. Perhaps one of the reasons their representation was because of their official positions within the Manchester Fifth Pan-African Congress itself: Abrahams was its Publicity Secretary while Du Bois was its International President. Interestingly, he did not participate as a delegate of the African National Congress as one would have expected, that was the task of a Marko Hlubi, but rather as the delegate of the International African Bureau Service. In this latter capacity, he was representing C. L. R. James and Paul Robeson, both of whom could not officially attend. One of the most effective ways the International African Bureau Service expressed its cosmopolitanism and international was the publication of the International African Opinion journal under the editorship of C. L. R. James.

In his presentation, “The Congress in Perspective”, Peter Abrahams sought to formulate several theses. First, the Fifth Pan-African Congress was the comprehensive gathering of Africans and people of African descent whose task was the destruction of imperialism. Second, because of the failure in confronting imperialism and colonialism, the Congress was positioning itself as a new form of leadership in replacement of the European Left. Third, the Congress was acknowledging W. E. B. Du Bois as the “Father” of the Pan- African Movement. Fourth, the necessity of the Fifth Pan-African Congress had been inspired by the meeting of the World Trade Union Conference which had taken place ten months earlier in London . Fifth, the Congress was the product of the creative inspiration and organizational skills of George Padmore, the Chairman of the International African Service Bureau. Praising the resolutions that were being formulated by the Congress and spelling out its mission, Abrahams concluded his speech with the following words: “It [the Congress] is a synthesis of experience and deliberate opinion that clearly reflects the political, economic and social aspirations of Africans and peoples of African descent. Indeed it constitutes the programme upon which the struggle for national liberation and social emancipation of the Colonial and Coloured peoples will be based, a struggle which must be fought and won before we can establish the Century of the Common Man. FORWARD TO THE SOCIALIST UNITED STATES OF AFRICA! LONG LIVE PAN-AFRICANISM!” This historical perspective was consonant with the ideological conundrums that Peter Abrahams sought to articulate in Mine Boy , which appeared in 1946, a year after the Congress.

W. E. B. Du Bois in his magisterial presentation, “The Pan-African Movement”, mapped out a totalizing vision of the philosophy of Pan Africanism. Among the salient characteristics of this modernistic ideology, he emphasized the following: it is a call for the political unity of Africa as well as a call for the spiritual and cultural unity of black people all over the world; although this philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth-century, it was after the First World War that it gained a new historical consciousness as a living philosophy by demanding that European powers free all its colonies, especially those populated by blacks; it was uncompromising in its posture that Africa people under colonial domination had a historical right to self-determination since Africa belongs to the Africans ; it was singular in its determination that Africa must be made to enter the modern age without interference from other races; at its core it was integrationist , consequently hostile to the separatism and black nationalism of Garveyism; it called for the absolute equality of all races (politically, socially and economically); it castigated white supremacist ideology for distorting religion and science with the purpose of proclaiming the supposed superiority of white people; it advocated inter-racial contact ; it argued that human reason should govern all institutions; and lastly, it postulated that democracy and liberty should be extended throughout the world. In many ways, the Fifth Pan–African Congress consecrated these principles as the core of this black philosophy of modernity.

One of the principal objectives of George Padmore in organizing the Congress was to transform the philosophy of Pan-Africanism as an ideology incubated in the African Diaspora into a living philosophy that would actualize itself in the form of African Nationalism in Africa. He was convinced that only when it metamorphosed itself into various forms of African nationalism(s), could this black philosophy of modernity contest imperialism and colonialism and initiate the process of decolonization . It was not by accident that Padmore made certain that relatively young Africans such as Peter Abrahams (South Africa), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana then Gold Coast), T. A. Wallace Johnson (Sierra Leone), Raphael Armattoe (Togo them Togoland), Garba Jahumpa (Gambia), participated in the proceedings. Retrospectively from the perspective of the African Independence Movement, the critical figure among Africans was Nkrumah, who was able to bring Pan-Africanism to its concrete historical realization with the independence of Ghana in 1957. In the second edition of 1963 of History of the Pan-African Congress , in his “Goodwill Message” recalled the historic moment of nearly two decades earlier in the following words: “The Fifth Pan-African Congress which took place in Manchester, England, in October 1945, set as its goal the liquidation of colonialism and imperialism from the Continent of Africa. . . Previous Pan-African Congress had laid emphasis on agitation for amelioration of colonial conditions. They called for reforms and pressed for nothing more than a voice by colonial people in their own government. The Fifth Pan-African Congress struck a new note. . . We made our resolutions and set out our programmes. It is no exaggeration to say that we went from Manchester knowing definitely where we were going. We were primed for action in the tearing struggle we clearly saw ahead. We had resolved to recover a continent in which only two small corners were free from imperialist occupation. . . At Manchester, we knew that we were speaking for all Africa, expressing the deepest desires and determination of a mighty continent to be wholly free. . . Although imperialism is well served by its twin handmaidens of colonialism and neo-colonialism, we will not allow it to remain in Africa to plunder our rightful heritage.” Nkrumah concretized further the actualization of Pan-Africanism in Africa by organizing the All African People's Conference in December 1958 in Accra.

Peter Abrahams not only subscribed to the principles of Pan-Africanism as articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois, he was also in agreement with many African patriots that the struggle for independence in Ghana as directed by Kwame Nkrumah was the prelude of the upcoming Africa Revolution. The latter point is the reason both Peter Abrahams and Richard Wright criss-crossed Accra several times in the early 1950s. For both of them much more crucial question than the potential or the actual metamorphosis of Pan-Africanism into Africa Nationalism was the more fundamental issue of what would Africa do with the legacy of European modernity or its effects on the continent, a legacy that was simultaneously both liberating and debilitating. Elsewhere we detailed how both in Accra in 1953 in an intensive and extensive discussion reflected on how the “irrationality” of tradition would limit and possibly overturn the “rationality” of modernity. Though in his essay of 1960, “The Blacks”, which could be taken as an obituary notice since it was written just after the death of his friend, the great African American writer, Peter Abrahams, reflecting on their encounter of seven years earlier, resisted the notion of his mentor that tradition had already defeated modernity in Africa even before the outbreak of the real war between them had really began, the permanent departure of the South African writer from England to Jamaica in 1957, in effect relinquishing all concerns and matters regarding Africa, particularly South African, was a bitter acknowledgement that Wright's prescient observation had actually come to pass. The perceived defeat of modernity by tradition in Africa has so profoundly embittered Peter Abrahams that the solicitations that he should return to South Africa or at the very least pay a visit by Nelson Mandela, on an official visit to Jamaica in 1992 (?) on a world tour thanking those that had clamored for his release from a twenty- seven year imprisonment, were politely but firmly rejected [deduction made by this author from prolonged telephone conversations with Peter Abrahams between Kingston and Los Angeles in 1999]. In his most recent book, The Black Experience in the 20 th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation (2000), written at the age of eighty-one, and seemingly an epitaph to his great intellectual work, gives an interesting but unconvincing rationale for his historical exhaustion with Africa.

It was the cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of Pan-Africanism of black intellectuals in London and the intellectual culture of the Negritude movement (Aimé Césaire, Alioune Diop, Leopold Sedar Senghor and others) located in Paris that Peter Abrahams brought to bear on his analysis of South Africa as a result of his six-week visit in 1952, after an absence of fourteen years. The trip commissioned by the London Observer resulted in a series of articles in the newspaper which were subsequently assembled together in Return to Goli . Unfortunately this brilliant book has never been taken seriously in South African intellectual history as it absolutely deserves. Its deceptive appearance as travel reportage has tended to make it prone to unsolicited dismissal. It is easily forgotten that its generic form of travel reportage makes it a pedigree of one of the most important South African books: Solomon T. Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa (1916). Both books are acute surveys of the complex topography of New African modernity: Plaatje's book is a socio-political canvassing at the beginning moment of New African Movement and Abrahams' text is a political and cultural examination at its precipitous end. In both, there are original portraits of New African intellectuals: in the former, there is a damning portrait of John Tengo Jabavu; in the latter, there are warm portraits of Yusuf Dadoo, James Moroka and Henry Nxumalo. Peter Abrahams pays tribute several times to H. I. E. Dhlomo, with whom as well as with Henry Nxumalo served their apprenticeship into journalism in the pages of The Bantu World under the great intellectual leadership of R. V. Selope Thema. This pedigree of the book should make one cautious about condescending towards it.

Although the book gives a chapter to each of the ‘racial groups' (Africans, Europeans, Indians and Coloureds), the principal focus here will largely be on the largest group. Return to Goli possesses its own singular merits. First, Abrahams was perceptively attuned to the historical project of the construction of modernity in South Africa, an undertaking of long duration, as the following statement indicates: “One thing is certain. There is in the Union today a Black community that is completely urban and completely Westernised. And there is evolving, too, a Black culture of the cities . The tribal content of this culture is subconscious, what the people carry within themselves of their tribal past. But their conscious orientation is away from the tribe and to the new , semi-universal culture-forms of the cities. In this the descendants of the trekkers [Afrikaneers] have been far outstripped by the descendants of the Black warriors whom they defeated. The most startling I found in the Union was this: that the educated Blacks of the cities seemed more ‘Western' and ‘European' in manners and habits than did the descendants of the trekkers. There are, of course, exceptions to this” (p. 159, my emphasis). The claim that Africans had entered deeper into modernity than the Afrikaners is startling. He attributes this achievement of advancement to the role of the missionaries in the dissemination of education among Africans. It is because of this reason that Peter Abrahams, like the other New African intellectuals, was ambivalently hostile to the missionaries.

Second, like the other New African intelligentsia, Peter Abrahams was conscious of the exemplary nature of New Negro modernity for New African modernity: “Next on the list of profitable entertainment comes music. At least half a dozen bands and ‘combinations' are good enough to do extremely well anywhere in the world. These bands play at the ‘social' and ‘hops' organized in all the halls of the gig cities of the country. They play the most modern jazz, jive and boogie-woogie music. . . A handful of ‘big name' individual performers have emerged. To them their fans accord the same love and loyalty that American fans accord Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Josh white and others. The most successful and the most popular is a young woman called Dolly Rathebe. Miss Rathebe is the biggest ‘name' in Black entertainment today and has a following any popular Hollywood singer would be proud of” (p. 156-7). For certain, these are some of the bands and groups pf the 1950s that Abrahams had in mind:

Similar to himself, when he discovered New Negro intellectuals such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, in the library of the Bantu Men's Social Center, as he relates in his autobiography Tell Freedom , he was well aware that behind Dolly Rathebe, Keppie Moeketsi, Jonas Ngangwa, Hugh Masekela respectively stood Bessie Smith, John Coltrane, J. J. Johnson, Miles Davis. Much more crucial, is his awareness that without popular culture, New African modernity would have had the resiliency that it had.

Third, and most astonishing, Peter Abrahams seems to have been presciently consciousness, barely within a year of the launching of Drum magazine in March 1951, that its appearance would be a momentous event in South African cultural history. The magazine enabled the emergence of Drum writers who belonged to the Sophiatown Renaissance, a cultural movement that approximated itself on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. These group of writers included among others: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Can Themba, G. R. Naidoo, Lewis Nkosi, Bessie Head, Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane. Abrahams concentrates on the historical figure of Henry Nxumalo who was to die tragically in 1957. Nxumalo was the original “Mr. DRUM” who introduced investigative reporting in South Africa in a dramatic story of the Bethel Farm, a prison farm that maximized the exploitation of African prisoners as well as that experimented with the ferocious forms of repression. Abrahams devotes just over twenty pages of the book to Nxumalo, and in the process quoting verbatim the Bethel Farm story. The fascination of Nxumalo for Abrahams resided not only in latter's nostalgia for the days when they were associated with The Bantu World newspaper, but also the fact that Nxumalo when he was a soldier in the Second World World imbibed New Negro culture from black American soldiers as well as the ideology of Pan-Africanism which he appropriated in black intellectual circles in London, both of which were to strengthen his indefatagible activities in the construction of New African modernity through Drum magazine. These two factors may explain the fascination the younger writers of the Drum writers' circle had for their senior colleague. In exemplary fashion, like some of his senior colleagues in the New African Movement, Nxumalo contributed articles to the Pittsburg Courier in the 1940s, as Allan Kirkland Soga had done in the 1900s to The Colored American Magazine , as Clements Kadalie had done in the 1920s to The Messenger , and as Keorapetse Kgositsile was to do in the 1960s to the Pan African Journal and in the 1970s to The Black World . In a reciprocal mode, Booker T. Washington had done with articles in the 1910s to John Tengo Jabavu's Imvo Zabantsundu and Solomon T. Plaatje's Tsala ea Batho (The People's Friend), Edward Blyden had done in the 1910s to Imvo Zabantsundu , George Padmore had done in the 1940s to The Torch , and Langston Hughes had done in the 1950s to Africa South and to Drum magazine. Henry Nxumalo belonged to a noble tradition of intellectual discourse across the Atlantic.

Fourth, Abrahams' argument that Africans had entered modernity in a thorough manner than the Afrikaners was predicated on his observation that the latter were unalterably opposed to any form of change or transformation. One of the startling refrains in the book is that the Afrikaners who saw themselves as representatives of Western civilization were leading the country towards the precipice because of their refusal to acquiesce to change as demanded by history and modernity: “Only change is permanent. But the whole story of White settlements in South Africa has conspired to make my fellow-countrymen enemies of change and, therefore, enemies of history. . . Always, their greatest enemy was change. When they wanted slavery to go on for ever in the Cape Colony the British had freed the slaves and they had trekked. Later, when everything seemed settled in their two republics [Transvaal and Orange Free State], change crept on them again in the form of the discovery of gold and diamonds. . . Their hostility to change, their refusal to acknowledge it till it has hit them with catastrophic impact od a war, supplies the key to the Afrikaans-speaking White's attitude to his Black fellow-countryman” (p. 170, 173, 174). Abrahams argues that ironically it was this resistance to change, in effect to modernity since the modern age is propelled by ceaseless change, that made Afrikaners “pure Africans” by developing a deep attachment to the African soil and landscape. In the midst of these formulations of 1952 , Abrahams makes a startling prediction which has proven prophetic that despite the violent resistance of the Afrikaners to political modernity he expects by 1990s black majority rule to prevail in South Africa. A fine, complex and contentious book by the last white President of South Africa, Frederik Willem De Klerk's The Last Trek---A New Beginning: The Autobiography (1999), portrays how the Afrikaners compelled by political modernity compromised with history by negotiating for a “New South Africa” with the African National Congress (ANC).

Fifth, regarding the Coloureds, his ‘people', Return to Egoli is very critical, perhaps even overcritical. Wishing to embrace him as a member the Coloured community because of his international reputation as a renowned and major African writer, he rejects this gesture because of he what he perceives as the Coloureds' racist attitudes towards Africans. Expressing his political philosophy of Pan-Africanism as reflected in his artistic and creative activities, Abrahams that he is an African writer and not a Coloured writer. Until the Coloured community accepted their Africanness, he would not allow it to embrace him as their writer. He makes clear that his hostility is directed at the very light-skinned middle class of the Coloured community: “Culturally, the Coloureds have no past, no tradition that goes to a time beyond the coming of the White man. They lack, as a group, the cohesive stability of the other groups. They are the most disunited of all the groups. They are the most prejudiced and colour conscious of all the non-White groups. . . The Coloured people have sharp racial attitudes. They look down on Blacks and aspiringly up to the Whites. And they would, doubtlessly, practise as rigid a colour bar against the Blacks if they were up there with the Whites. Among themselves there are socially important gradings. The fairest, those with the straightest hair and most ‘European' features, form the social élite. Next come those who are darker but still have straight hair and ‘European' features. Then there are Coloured ‘masses'. These usually have light-brown skins with kinky hair and near Negroid features. In this group, too, are the very dark, whose straight or wavy hair and features are the only proof that they are not Blacks” (p. 57, 63). He was perplexed why the Coloureds would embrace African American intellectual culture and expressive cultural forms yet reject those of Africans contiguous to them: the response that this was a preference for modernity would be insufficient since he was fascinated by the accekerated entrance of Africans into modernity. Abrahams was optimistic that these attitudes would change as the Coloureds were compelled to form politically alliances with Indians and Blacks (Africans) in opposition to white domination and oppression. He mentioned in passing progressive organizations that would to instill democratic beliefs in those struggling to construct a new social order in modernity.

Sixth, Abrahams gives a synoptic characterization of the lived cultural and political experience of the Indians, which is based on his having lived in Durban for a year before he left the country in 1939. Although he draws sharp contrast between racial groups, and in many ways contentious and disputable, they nevertheless serve in totality to highlight the complexity of South African cultural fabric: “Politically the Indians are at once more sophisticated, mature, wise and united than the Coloureds. They do not suffer from the colossal inferiority complex from which the Coloureds suffer. Unlike the Coloureds, they do not look aspiringly to the Whites. They have a past and a rich culture from which to draw strength and support. . . In the early phases of their struggle the Indians kept aloof from the other non-Whites. The South African Indian Congress was, at that time, led by the small minority of rich merchants who competed so successfully against the Whites and inspired such violent reactions from the Whites” (p. 88-89). The initiation of satygara (passive resistance) by Mahatma Gandhi before he left South Africa permanently for India in 1913 was not only a form of resistance to white domination, but it was also the beginning of the shifting of political power from the merchant class to the Indian middle class. By the 1940s to the 1950s, as exemplified by the political practices of Dr. Yusef Dadoo, a real and serious student of Gandhi, the satygara was mobilized in solidarity struggle with Africans and Coloureds as well as aligned with radical Marxist politics. Using satygara in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, Yusef Dadoo played a heroic role. This is the reason that Peter Abrahams in the concluding chapter of the book writes an instructive and brilliant portrait of this Indian Communist in action.

In utilizing the philosophy of Pan-Africanism as a perspective in Return to Goli , Peter Abrahams made an enduring reading of South African history that entered its profound crisis in 1948 which was terminated in the great victory of 1994.