John Henderson Soga is two years older than his more renowned brother Allan Kirkland Soga. Both are sons of Tiyo Soga (1829-71), the first modern African intellectual in South Africa. John Henderson Soga published two substantial historical works which were heavily inclined towards ethnology within a short period: The South-Eastern Bantu (1930) and The Ama-Xosa: Life and Customs (1932). Allan Kirkland Soga wrote a manuscript called The Problem of the Social and Political Regeneration of Africa which was supposed to be published in 1903, but got lost between London, where illustrations were being made to accompany the text, and New York, where the whole venture was suppose to see the light of day. Perhaps one of the reasons why Kirkland Soga is more famous is that while he was deeply preoccupied with the relationship between New Negro modernity and New African modernity within the context of cosmopolitanism, Henderson Soga examined the relationship between tradition and modernity within South Africa from a perspective of tradition. Kirkland Soga's cosmopolitanism made it possible for him to write major essays between 1903 and 1906 on the political adversities in the construction of South African modernity for the New Negro journal The Colored American Magazine based in New York. The second reason may be the fact that not only he founded Izwi Labantu in 1897 with Walter Rubusana in opposition to the conservative hegemony of John Tengo Jabavu's Imvo Zabantsundu newspaper, but also that in 1930s he contributed a weekly by-line to Umteteli wa Bantu, which was then publishing many contributions from other New African intellectuals such as R. V. Selope Thema, H. Selby-Msimang, H. I. E. Dhlomo, and Solomon T. Plaatje. In such a circle of colleagues and friends placed him in a prominent place within the New African Talented Tenth of the New African Movement. Lastly, by being a founding member of the African National Congress in 1912, he placed himself on one of the landmarks of South African history. With his two books, John Henderson Soga places himself within another intellectual tradition of the New African Movement: that of New African historiography. Many would consider the founding text of this historiography to be Walter Rubusana's History of South Africa from the Native Standpoint. A mythical book because it has proven untraceable in all libraries of the world (even on the World Catalogue on the Internet), yet held in very high esteem by Jordan Kush Ngubane a few years before he died in 1985. Other books which perhaps belong to this historiographic tradition are the following: The Bantu: Past and Present: An Ethnographical & Historical Study of the Native Races of South Africa (1920); Magema M. Fuze's The Black People : And Whence They Came (Abantu Abamnyama: Lapa Bavela Ngakona, 1922 [although written a few years earlier]); Jordan Kush Ngubane's Ushaba (1974). Each of these books is a reconstruction and a rewritting of South African history from a New African standpoint. What John Henderson Soga writes in the Preface to The South-Eastern Bantu could be taken as one of the objectives of the New African historiography: "The primary object of the book was to place in the hands of the rising generation of the Bantu something of the history of their people, in the hope that it might help them to a clearer perception of who and what they are, and to encourage in them a desire for reading and for studying their language." This aim is not that different from that of Magema M. Fuze's stated in the Introduction [Inkondlo] to his book: "Even though I may now be alone in this project, I think that there will be many of us desirous of having the book Abantu Abamnyama in our schools, in order that our children may get to know where they originally came from, because at present they do not know. It would be well for you all to know that many of our tribes were left behind by us at the Horn of Africa (Suez Canal). There are very many tribes there. From the extent and large size of Africa, I can safely assert that those of our people still living there are more enlightened than we are here." The historical vision of the New African historiography was fastened on the whole continent. It is very surprising that neither John Henderson Soga nor Magema M. Fuze merited consideration in Z. K. Matthews' South African intellectual history which appeared on the pages of Imvo Zabantsundu from June 3 to November 21, 1961.