Although Marshall Maxeke is not as known in South African political and intellectual history as his partner and wife Charlotte Manye Maxeke, there can be no doubting the fact that he was a central member of the New African Movement. Given his death at the age of 54, preceded by a decade of ill health, his tasks and achievements were perhaps not fully realized. Despite his relatively short life, his intellectual and political activities exemplified in an extraordinary way the achievements of New Africanism within the Movement. Like Charlotte Manye, he studied in the late nineteenth-century at Wilberfoce University in Ohio, where they met and were married. Both were very fortunate to have had W. E. B. Du Bois  as a teacher, who was then teaching Classics at this historically black institution of higher learning. When they both returned to South Africa in 1900 or 1901 (different books name different dates) with B. A. degrees, they became the conduits of the transmission of the historical principles of New Negro modernity in South Africa. This can be seen in the following: they both founded the Wilberforce Institute (High School) at Evaton, modelled on their alma mater; during the moment of the high tension between the Ethiopianism of Mangane Maake Mokone and the AME Church of Henry Turner and Levi Coppin, they aligned themselves with the New Negroes rather than with their compatriots the New Africans; they advocated a strong unity between New Negroism and New Africanism. Their principal task seems to have been to transform and transplant these historical principles into South Africa with the intent of forging and participating in the invention of New African modernity. In some sense, Marshall Maxeke in his person seems to have represented a harmonious and perfect blending of the New African and the New Negro. In this he was following on the footsteps of F. Z. S. Peregrino, the Ghanian editor of the South African Spectator in Cape Town, who in effect transplanted the ideology of Pan-Africanism in South Africa. Interestingly enough, also in this, he became the predecessor of another Ghanian, James E. Kwegyir Aggrey (“Aggrey of Africa”), who, in the three months he spent in South Africa in 1921, completely electrified the New African intellectuals within the New African Movement. This astonishing obeisance of the New Africans to Aggrey is perhaps explainable by their having been hypnotized by what they considered to be the classic blending in his personality of the intellectual principles of the New Negro and the New African. The elder statesmen of New African Movement, Solomon T. Plaatje, John Dube, Pixley ka Isaka Seme (even though Seme was Maxeke’s junior by six years) seem to have been taken with Marshall Maxeke’s particular nuance of this blending. Perhaps the real reason all three embraced Marshall Maxeke is that he advocated a form of political conservatism against all forms of radicalisms, which was refined, sophisticated and smooth, as we shall see in a moment. This would seem to have been the ideology of this particular political conservatism that R. V. Selope Thema seems to have learned from Marshall Maxeke (who was briefly editor of Umteteli wa Bantu newspaper) when he decided to catapult himself into the principal ideologue of the New African Movement on its pages in the 1920s. John Dube, as editor of the newspaper he launched in 1903 Ilanga lase Natal seems to have been the first one to note the intellectual potential of the young Marshall Maxeke, or his political conservatism. In a long letter to the Editor, in effect to Dube, Maxeke lamented what he considered to be the false attribution by certain correspondents of the “political extremism” of the Ethiopian Church to the A. M. E. Church, or that the independent black churches in South Africa are merely a reflection of the independent black churches in United States: “No doubt one who has been carefully studying the character of the argument will eventually come to the conclusion that what they are saying is, after all, not for the good of the Government nor for the benefit of the public, for it more or less causes the Government to mistrust some of its warmest supporters. . . . They have said all but the truth in regard to the operations and alms of the A. M. E. Church. We invite the eyes of all Christendom to note with us the following points which the accusers of this Church lay down as their formula, viz: 1. That the A. M. E. Church teaches an everlasting hatred of the white man. 2. That it teaches natives to claim their right to franchise. 3. That it preaches sedition among the natives. 4. That it teaches them to be like the white man. 5. That it is the sole factor of Ethiopianism. The first accusation is a racorous one and has been maliciously formulated by its expounders only for the torturing of its ministers, because never in the wide world did the A. M. E. Church in any form preach hatred to the white man. . . . The A. M. E. Church is not only for the black people, as some of its accusers will have it to gain their end, but it preaches the brotherhood of men everywhere. Who dares say this Church preaches against the white man?” (“Correspondence: A. M. E. Church and the Recent Alarm”, Ilanga lase Natal, September 9, 1904). This is an extraordinary document by any measure that will be studied in detail elsewhere. It merits being posited as the founding text of the ideology of political conservatism within the New African Movement. This is what appealed to John Dube, and no doubt that is the reason also that he gave it ample space in his newspaper. John Dube, like many other New African intellectuals, was hostile to Ethiopianism. They all failed to comprehend that Ethiopianism was a search for the expressive forms of African modernity and modernism. Only F. Z. S. Peregrino seems to have registered the great historical uniqueness of this independent black church movement. Having first projected his political conservatism against Ethiopianism of Mokone and other African patriots, Marshall Maxeke was later to put it into duel against the I. C. U. (Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union) of Clements Kadalie, A. W. G. Champion, H. Selby-Msimang. This was the case when Maxeke wrote a series of articles in Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1920s, a newspaper owned by the Transvaal Chamber of Mines. It is not accidental that these articles were published in early months of the founding of the newspaper with John Dube and Solomon T. Plaatje designated as editors (whether they were actual editors, rather than their names merely pasted on the masthead of the newspaper, still needs to be established by further research). In the first issue of Umteteli wa Bantu, Plaatje and Dube conjointly ‘wrote’ in part the following: “So much is said and heard of the rights of the native peoples, and so little of concrete effort to secure those rights is observable. That certain privileges to which all humanity is entitled are withheld from the natives no one can deny and it is equally positive that those privileges must be granted. The franchise so wantonly disregarded or misused by many Europeans is a valuable gift, and no less to be desired is the right to own property and the right to walk freely in our land untrammeled by Pass Law restrictions and annoyances, and the right of self government. Industrial equality and the right to progress, free education and a fair chance for our children---these are the things withheld from us and which we daily pray to be given. But are we ready to receive them? Were all our disabilities at once removed could we extract any national good from out of our emancipation? Could we govern ourselves wisely, and could we make for ourselves a place in the sun? These are matters to the consideration of which the leaders of our people should thoughtfully apply themselves so that they may wisely direct the ignorant mass of their fellows and guide them along a carefully chosen path to bring them to a realisation of their hopes. We lack the centuries of progress out of which has been evolved the present day civilisation of Europe. Our training, our hereditary and our national mentality have combined to hinder progress, and we must wander for many years in the desert until we reach the land of promise. We are politically backward, and the great bulk of our people has been and is content to wallow in the mire of our national ignorance and political lethargy. It is within us however, to do that which will enable us to emerge and we can secure our political and social enlargement if we can set ourselves manfully and courageously to the task which is before us. Let us not imagine that we can rise politically or socially until we have proved ourselves worthy or that we can attain greatness without long and toilsome effort” (“Our Rights”, Umteteli wa Bantu, vol. 1 no. 1, May 1, 1920). The task before the great women and men of the New African Movement was the construction of modernity in South Africa. This brilliant Editorial, a stunning historical mixture of progressivism and conservatism, was prescient because it encapsulated the binarism that was to bedevil political modernity in South Africa as the twentieth-century unfolded in a series dramatic encounters. Marshall Maxeke latched on to the conservatism of this duality. In his first contribution to Umteteli wa Bantu, Maxeke posulates the following: “The persistent manner of imparting knowledge by persuading others to adopt certain beliefs constitutes a doctrine. Such doctrine may not perhaps be advantageous to those whom it is intended to impress, but all the same its supporters do their best to keep it alive. Many things in South africa are said, sometimes unduly passionate, and if we consider the cause which excites them all, it is the living together of human beings who are not alike. Science teaches us that unlike bodies attract, but how far this applies to South Africans, only students of human affairs can suggest. However, level minded South Africans today are interesting themselves in finding the remedy for each race to gain the goodwill of the other; and the only solution to meet the position is conciliation. The present awakening of the Bantu demands well defined methods to draw the attention of those whom we regard as indifferent to our cause. We can not conceive of the reasonableness of the idea some of our fellows often display regarding our relationships with European races. Even if we aspire we must remember the consequences of the gospel we scatter” (“The Middle Course”, August 21, 1920). This advocacy for reasonableness, moderation and conciliation was to reinforce his political conservatism. One of its many unfortunate results was Maxeke’s unrelenting hostility to the South African Garveyism as exemplified in S. M. Bennett Ncwana’s newspaper The Black Man, modelled on Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World (“Our Bigoted”, Umteteli wa Bantu, November 27, 1920). It was in the context of these writings that Marshall Maxeke assumed the editorial mantle of the newspaper from Solomon T. Plaatje and John L. Dube. Since in all probability Marshall Maxeke was still editor of the newspaper, rather his successor Abner R. Mapanya, when R. V. Selope Thema made his debut, it is not surprising that Selope Thema inherited the political conservatism of his mentor. R. V. Selope Thema was to play an unparalleled role in Umteteli wa Bantu in effect transforming it as an intellectual forum for theorizing the construction of modernity. In other words, R. V. Selope Thema carried the legacy of Marshall Maxeke deep into the twentieth-century. Although it was Gwayi Tyazamshe and Elijah Makiwane, outstanding Cape intellectuals, who as missionaries and proselytizers of modernity in Northern Transvaal (Zoutpansberg where Selope Thema was born), indicated to him that the pathways to modernity were through Christianity, Western civilization and education, it was Marshall Maxeke who imparted to R. V. Selope Thema his greatest intellectual and cultural passions: the attainments of New Negro modernity and political conservatism. Just as the generational shift from Marshall Maxeke to R. V. Selope Thema indicates the complex intellectual relationships and transactions within the New African Movement, so likewise from R. V. Selope Thema to Jordan Kush Ngubane: the controlling arch in this instance was anti-Marxism.