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ALLAN KIRKLAND SOGA

Like Pixley ka Isaka Seme and John L. Dube, Allan Kirkland Soga seems to have been profoundly influenced by the political and philosophical idea of "The Regeneration of Africa", a historical construct which was articulated and theorized by leading African American intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. It was through this philosophical concept that diasporan intelligentsia invented Pan Africanism as a political instrument for the liberation of black people living under the oppressive conditions of modernity. Although this politico-philosophical idea was founded by Marin Delany (    ), it was Alexander Crummell (       ) who formulated and elaborated its conceptual and historical nature. In an abbreviated form, Crummell's magisterial essay, "The Regeneration of Africa" (1865), can be summarized around these four principles: African Americans as missionaries can bring to Africa spiritual enlightenment and Christian civilization in the struggle against paganism; although trade and commerce can bring about African progress, they are incapable of bringing into being the redemption of Africa; and lastly, it is the Africans themselves who can bring about the regeneration and redemption of Africa. In probably the first biographical sketch of Allan Kirkland Soga ever written, it pronounces the importance of the idea of "The Regeneration of Africa" in his political thinking: "Mr. Soga recognizes in the Negro what he takes to be a great coming factor in the regeneration of Africa, and as an Afro-Anglican would like to hasten a Conference of black men from the four worlds, to discuss the black man's future if the Negro can sink his differences sufficiently to combine forces towards that desirable end" (Sarah A. Allen, "Mr. Alan Kirkland Soga", The Colored American Magazine, February 1904). Not only Soga wrote a manuscript entitled The Problem of the Social and Political Regeneration of Africa (which was lost just before publication in United States in 1903), many of his essays whether appearing in the The Colored American Magazine or in Izwi Labantu were informed by this idea. Soga considered newspaper as the principal forums for the propagating the idea of the regeneration of Africa. His founding of Izwi Labantu newspaper in 1897, with Walter Rubusana and Umhalla, was towards the realization of this objective. From 1898, he became the principal editor of the newspaper. Also his founding in 1902 of the South African Native Press Association with F. Z. S. Peregrino (the Ghanian founder and editor of South African Spectator in Cape Town), was part of this historical project. It was in his column entitled "The Cult of Race Leadership", which run in Umteteli wa Bantu between April 14, 1923 to May 16, 1925 that Soga amplified this idea. In this two-year programmatic forum, he attempted to forge a synthesis of the ideological perspectives of New Negroism and New Africanism. Given that it was in the columns of this same great newspaper in the 1920s that Solomon T. Plaatje, R. V. Selope Thema, H. Selby Msimang, H. I. E. Dhlomo were attempting to construct New African modernity and modernism in emulation of New Negro modernity and modernism, we can clearly see the imprint of Allan Kirkland Soga on his younger colleagues. It would seem that R. V. Selope Thema was the most conscious inheritor of this remarkable legacy. Although Allan Kirkland Soga is today forgotten, like some of the leading New African intellectuals, it is through his imprint on Selope Thema that he will be re-discovered in the near future.

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