A writer  who has a deep impact on such varied great world writers as Eduoard Glissant from Martinique and Saul Bellow from United States, as Thomas Mofolo has had with his Sotho novel Chaka (published in 1925 although written in 1910) must himself in all probability be a great writer. In South Africa itself it has been evaluated as truly a formidable literary work by a no lesser writer than the author of the classic Xhosa novel Ingqumbo yeminyanya (1940, The Wrath of the Ancestors), A. C. Jordan ("Bantu Languages of Southern Africa", in Encyclopedia of Southern Africa, [ed.] Eric Rosenthal, 1961). Mofolo first novel, Moeti oa Bochabela (The Traveller of the East, 1907), was originally serialised in the Paris Evangelican Mission Society newspaper in Maseru called Leselinyane. What this novel indicates is that from the very beginning of his literary carrer Mofolo was already a great stylist. The novel overwhelms with its poetic power of remarkable lyricism. Its poetic realism in our century has been equalled by a very few South African fictional works. Already in this novel, Mofolo's Manichaean vision of the struggle between modernity and tradition, so powerfully realized in Chaka, is deeply manifest. Moeti oa Bochabela clearly shows that Thomas Mofolo's attribution of absolute evilness to African traditional societies, what he considered the heart of darkness of heathenism, was derived not from the historical actuality of these then defeated societies, but rather, from the vortex of his ideological alignment with Christian 'civilization'. This is not to imply that his affiliation to the 'enlightenment' of modernity was not deeply and genuinely felt. Despite its genuineness, it was unabashedly ideological. This ideological perspective, which informed the central thrust of this allegorical novel, was rehearsed again in his second novel, Pitseng (1910), an ethnographic text. By the time of his last fictional work, Chaka, a historical novel, this ideological perspective is utilized to portray a damning canvas of African historical societies. Mofolo's complete alignment with Christianity, particularly its interpretation of African societies, did not resolve his problematical relationship with the forces of European modernity which had colonized and subjugated African history. Although Thomas Mofolo is widely perceived to have been an apostle of modernity and an uncritical apologist of Christianity, it is not well known that he was very ambivalent about the historical experience of modernity, as these excerpts from Pitseng indicate: "Courtship has become a plaything. This beautiful thing that belongs to mature young men and young women seeking to establish their homes, and which is the vehicle whereby they consummate their youth, has today become a plaything and a mockery. . . . This is exactly where the heathens are telling the truth when they say that these evil things come from the whites, and have entered into Lesotho through the Christian converts, because the habit whereby a young man and his girl friend make their own decision about marriage began with the converts. This spirit has completely destroyed the youth of Lesotho, to say nothing about those of Pitseng. . . . The modern days are said to be days of light, of wisdom, of progress, while the olden days, the days of the difaqane [upheaval], are said to have been days of darkness, of foolishness, and ignorance. But in this matter of marriage we have found that to many people those days of old were the days of wisdom, and not of darkness and ignorance, and it is the modern days that are days of darkness and ignorance, and not of wisdom and light" (cited in Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written Sesotho Prose by Daniel P. Kunene, Johannesburg, 1989, p.92-3). Given that this book is the most authoritative study of Thomas Mofolo, we conclude with these words from it: "It is a testimony to Mofolo's great talent that, with only three published books, and on the basis of only one of these, he is counted among the great writers of the world, and continues to be read and enjoyed, and to engage the minds of scholars in the process of trying to understand the deeper impulses that made him the kind of writer he was" P.234).