Perhaps the one singular distinction of  Credo Mutwa within the various generations of New African intellectuals is that he moved from tradition to modernity and back to tradition. This may be the explanation of why in conceiving himself as a healer, shaman and ‘witchdoctor’ he refuses to distinguish between history and myth, between explanation and speculation, between metaphysician and dialectician, between philosophy and politics, between creative writer and philosopher, between animism and Christianity, between autobiography and fiction. While Credo Mutwa’s refusal or incapacity to recognize disciplinary boundaries, different epistemological systems of explanation, as well as different modes of discourse, accounts for his great facility as a story teller, it is also at the center of his endless political blunders. It is because of his discounting or rejection of the differential historical rhythms between tradition and modernity, with the possibility of abolishing them completely that has made him think of himself as a historian of African metaphysical systems when in actual fact he is a great story-teller of African traditional narratives.  All of these complex matters of knowledge are broached in a preliminary form in a autobiographical manner in his progolemenon to his life work announced in the Introduction to his first major book My People (1969): “Many strange things have happened in Africa; things that have puzzled, disgusted and shocked the world, especially in recent years; things for which the world has had little or no explanation and things that can best be explained by laying bare---to the rest of humanity---the strange working of the mind of the African. . . . Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, Angola’s rebellion, the massacres in the Congo, riots and killings in South Africa---all soon to be written in blood permanently on the highway of human history, all soon to be written in bleached bones on the desert of time---all were started by one thing---the total lack of understanding between black and white; the utter failure of one race of human beings to understand what goes on the minds of the other race. The saddest thing is that the misunderstanding is mostly on one side---the more powerful side of the two---the white man’s side. If any black man with a little knowledge of English, French or Portuguese wants to study the white man---as I have done---all he has to do is to go into the nearest town and become a regular customer of one of the second-hand bookshopst here. He must buy and read no less than twenty different kinds of books and magazines a month for a period of no less than ten years. He must read classics, philosophical works and even cheap murder mysteries and science fiction. He must read homer, Virgil, Aristotle, and the rest. He must turn the pages of Walter Scott, Voltaire or Peter Cheyney. He must read the newspapers with great care. Gradually, as the years pass, he will gain more or less a clear understanding of the white man, his way of life, his hopes and ambitions. But few white people have ever bothered to study the African people carefully---and by this I do not mean driving around the African villages taking photographs of dancing tribesmen and women and asking a few questions, and then going back and writing a book---a useless book full of errors, wrong impressions and just plain nonsense. Many of the books written by Europeans about Africans should be relegated to the dustbin. . . . So great is the lack of understanding between black and white in Africa that there are white men who refuse to accept the fact that a black man is a human being like the Indian, the Chinese, and the European himself. . . . ‘You cannot fight an evil disease with sweet medicine,’ is the saying popular amongst us witchdoctors. And one cannot hope to cure a putrid malady like inter-racial hatred and misunderstanding by mincing words.  So I warn readers that they are in for a nasty shock. This is not a book for people who prefer hypocrisy to fact. In this book the love of life of many African tribes will be openly and frankly discussed, as will their religious beliefs, their crafts, and so forth. In later chapters you will read about the African peoples of the present time, their strange and varied reactions to civilisation and also what they think about events in Africa today. You will read about many things that have been deliberately withheld from the world---things that are common knowledge to all African people within the shores of this continent.  In offering this information to the world, I do not claim it to be the last word---the book to end all books, I intend this book to be the forerunner of many more to come, and one to pave the way for other African writers, some of whom may have amassed much more knowledge of our fatherlands in the course of their lives than I have done. . . . On returning from Rhodesia that year [1958], I visited my mother and grandfather in Zululand after more than thirty years and, at their command, I renounced Christianity and underwent the Ceremony of Purification in order to begin training as witchdoctor  and also in preparation for assuming the post of custodian of our sacred tribal relics, in the event of my grandfather’s death. I have now completed my training as a medicine man, and have gained a lot of knowledge that I shall lay out in this book. In March 1960, a young Basuto woman whom I loved, and hoped to wed in place of my present faithless spouse, was among those who died when police fired on the crowd at Sharpeville, near Vereeniging [one of his sons was killed as collaborator during the Soweto Uprising of 1976]. On the night before she was to be buried her parents, her brother and two sisters, and three of their children, cut off tufts of their hair and threw them into her still open coffin, swearing to avenge her if it took them a million years, even if they should die in doing so. I took what is called a ‘Chief’s Great Boold Oath’, cutting a vein in my hand (the left one) and letting ten drops of blood flow into one of the gaping bullet wounds that defiled her dark brown slender body, swearing to tell the world the truth about the Bantu people and so save many of my countrymen the agony of the bereavement we felt. I swore to do this, come imprisonment, torture or death, and even if the very fires of hell or the cold of eternal darkness stood in my way. The book is only the beginning of the fulfilment of my oath, an oath whose keeping has become the only purpose of my intolerable life, and which will still be binding on my children and their children’s children. So, even if this book is destroyed, I shall write other works like it until one of them does survive---be it after my death.” All of these reflections make clear that not only is Credo Mutwa perhaps the last great intellectual force in South Africa representing tradition when modernity has triumphed, he is also peculiarly a representative figure of the intermixture of the central forms of our intellectual traditions, intermixing H. I. E. Dhlomo and Isaiah Shembe, R. R. R. Dhlomo and R. V. Selope Thema, and so on. Mutwa has positioned himself through prose in the late twentieth-century what S. E. K. Mqhayi had achieved through his poetry in the early part of the twentieth-century: straddling the intermediate position between tradition and modernity. Both occupy a cultural position in our intellectual history which has not as yet been full theorized. Given this positioning, it is not surprising that Credo Mutwa posits “lack of understanding” as the fundamental reason for the conflictual nature of the currents caught in the maelstrom of modernity in South Africa. An intellectual portrait of Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa will have to concern itself with the historical explanation for this epistemological misapprehension. In this year 2000, Credo Mutwa is one of the last surviving members of the New African Movement: the others being Ezekiel Mphahlele, Nelson Mandela, Lewis Nkosi, Nadine Gordimer. A portrait of Mutwa within this cultural movement would perhaps be the most challenging and contentious: it would have prove that himself he is/was a major figure.