When Archibald Campbell Jordan passed away in 1968, his student and sucessor to the Professorship of African Languages at UCLA, Professor Daniel Kunene, author of the only existant critical study of Thomas Mofolo and other texts, wrote an obituary in which he delineated the productivity of the great Xhosa novelist: "When in my Kroonstad High School days [early 1940s], Dr. (then Mr.) Jordan was one day introduced to some visitors while teaching my class, one of them said excitedly, 'Jordan? Jordan? The one who wrote Ingqumbo yeminyanya (1940) [The Wrath of the Ancestral Spirits]?' This was confirmed, and the visitor shook Dr. Jordan's hand vigorously for a long time, using various Xhosa exclamatory interjections. No wonder. Ingqumbo yeminyanya had burst into South African Bantu-language literary scene, and had immediately been recognized as being a great tragedy, the creation of a master mind. . . . Jordan was, in addition, a poet of no mean order. In 1936 he published several of his poems in the newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, and in 1958 several in Ikhwezi lomso. The poems were in Xhosa, some accompanied by English translations prepared by Jordan himself. The English versionof one of these poems has been included in many anthologies of African literature under title 'You tell me to sit quiet'. . . . As a literary critic, Jordan was not only perceptive and incisive in his comments, but he always viewed the works he was evaluating against a broad background of history and prevailing social problems. This can be seen mainly in his series of articles in Africa South, but also in other critical essays such as his evaluation of the works of S. E. K. Mqhayi, Xhosa poet, novelist and essayist. . . . However this may be, it seems that, with the publication of his unpublished materials, Jordan's impact on the African literary world should continue to be felt for a long time" ("A. C. Jordan (1907-1968)", African Arts, Winter 1969). As this statemeny indicates, was a literary pathifinder of that cultural space between tradition and modernity. The Wrath of the Ancestral Spirits belongs together with Thomas Mofolo's Chaka as the major novels written in African languages in South Africa, although they differ fundamentally in their historical positions concerning the dialectic between tradition and modernity. In the last essay written just before leaving South Africa permanently for exile in 1961 on the major works and figures in the modern literary history of African languages, A. C. Jordan was being too modest in not including himself along with Thomas Mofolo, S. E. K. Mqhayi, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi as a major practitioner within this tradition ("Bantu Languages of Southern Africa", in Encyclopedia of Southern Africa, compiled and edited by Eric Rosenthal, Frederick Warne & Co., New York, 1961 [1965]). The first importance of this essay is in indicating his the life-long passion for these great poets, Mqhayi and Vilikazi. Its second importance is in reminding us that A. C. Jordan had another deep preoccupation: Literary Theory. His essays which appeared in Africa South in the 1950s, to which Daniel Kunene alludes, were the first theoretical system of African literature written by any New African intellectual. (H. I. E. Dhlomo's very brilliant essays of the 1930s were more in the nature of penetrative incursion into historicization of African dramatic forms, rather than their actual theoretical systematization.) Jordan's essays were later assembled posthumously as Towards An African Literature (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973). It would be interesting to speculate as to what extent this book is affiliatively related to Ezekiel Mphahlele's The African Image (1962 [1974]) and Lewis Nkosi's Home and Exile and Other Selections (1965 [1983]), and their subsequent literary practices. A singular distinction of A. C. Jordan is that he was a major literary figure who was ideologically committed to Communism, through his membership to the Non-European Unity Movement. No other major literary figure within the New African Movement had such a great desire for Marxism. Consequently Archibald Campbell Jordan is perhaps the most interesting through whom to examine the relationship between Marxism and modernism. Still another distinction of Jordan is that her wife, Phyllis Ntantala, is an important Left intellectual in her own right. Her book, The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (1992) is a fascinating read, far beyond its illumination of the historical formation of A, C. Jordan. Ntantala's book is part of a new cultural formation, the autobiographies of such women as Maggie Resha (1991), Ellen Kuzwayo (1985) and others.