Nontetha is one of the remarkable figures to have emerged directly from the conflict between modernity and tradition in South African history. Emerging from the historical drama of the defeat of the Xhosa nation by British imperialism, she founded the Church of the Prophetess Nontetha immediately after the world influenza epidemic of 1918 as a means of negotiating the imposed European modernity on terms which she thought would be favourable to the interests of Africans. Her sphere of activity was Christianity. She wished to Africanize Christianity in the hope of transforming it into a historical bridge through which the African people can make a transition from tradition into modernity. Being illiterate, Nontetha sought to effect this transition in largely spiritual terms. In seeking to effect this revolutionary transformation, Nontetha belongs to an extraordinary lineage that stretches from Ntsikana through Mangane Maake Mokone and James Dwane to Isaiah Shembe. Adjacent to this lineage, she was a creator of another intellectual and political heritage, that of women playing a leading and fundamental role in the construction of South African modernity. In this, she was similar to her contemporary Charlotte Manye Maxeke (1874-1939). It is unlikely that their historical paths ever crossed each other in a conscious way. In her historical role, Nontetha was in many ways New African, particularly in the way through her activity and practice she attempted to negotiate a historical understanding between Christianity and Ethiopianism. Since Nontetha belongs to the tradition of Ntsikana, the first famous and known African (Xhosa) convert to Christianity in the early part of the nineteenth-century, it is perhaps proper to try to understand the beginning phases of this ideological hegemonic domination which resulted in European history suppressing African history in South Africa. This historical act of subversion seems to have been ‘necessary’ in order for the kind of modernity that eventuated in South Africa to occur. In his book, Ntsikana: The Story of an African Convert (Lovedale Press, 1914 [1904, a slightly different version]), capturing this particular moment of European entrance into African history through the conversion of Ntsikana, John Knox Bokwe writes: “Ntsikana one morning went, as usual, to the kraal. The sun’s rays were just peeping over the eastern horizon, and, as he was standing at the kraal gate, his eyes fixed with satisfied admiration on his favourite ox, he thought he observed a ray, brighter than ordinary, striking the side of his beast. As he watched the animal, Ntsikana’s face betrayed excited feelings. He enquired of a lad standing near by: ‘Do you observe the thing that I now see?’ The lad, turning his eyes in the direction indicated, replied: ‘No, I see nothing there.’ Ntsikana, recovering from the trance, uplifted himself from the ground, on which he had meantime stretched himself, and said to the puzzled boy: ‘You are right; the sight was not one to be seen by your eyes.’ . . . . In the afternoon Ntsikana at last appears, stalking slowly from the company of lookers on towards the dancing party. For some reason or other, he appears today not to be quite in the humour for this dancing. One of his admirers nitices this, and, by way of trying to put him right, shouts out a flattering address, well known to, and greatly appreciated by Ntsikana:--‘Wesuka u-Nokonongo, imaz egush’ ibele’ [There goes Nokonongo (nickname), cow that conceals her udder, i.e., keeps back her milk, hinting at great reserve of power.] He gives a start. Suddenly a violent gale arises. At first, no one heeds it. It keeps on, however, till at last the dancers stop for a little, and Ntsikana returns to his seat. Strange to say the wind suddenly subsides! His neighbors resume the dance; and he too after a while gets up again. But, immediately the gale rises once more! Again Ntsikana returns to his seat, as crest-fallen as ever; and the wind ceases. A third time, he gets up, and a third time this horrid gale arises as furiously as ever. The interested and superstitious gazers exchange looks of astonishment at this strange occurrence repeating itself each time the son of Gaba rises to join the dance! Who has bewitched him? All at once, the vision of bright rays which he saw in the morning shining gloriously on the side of his favourite ox, Hulushe, is recalled to his remembrance, and without a single word of explanation, or apology to any one, he orders his people to get ready to return home! All of them, surprised, and whispering puzzled enquiries as to the cause of so early a departure, obet the order and march home, greatly vexed that their pleasure had been so abruptly brought to an end, with no explanation hinted as to the reason why. As they neared home, they came to a small river. Here Ntsikana threw aside his blanket, plunged himself into the water and washed off all the red ochre that painted his body. He then proceeded on his way, while his followers were yet more surprised at this additional strangeness and eccentricity of behaviour. That night all the inhabitants of Ntsikana’s kraal betook themselves to their huts with not a little to comment upon. This introduced the precedent of washing off the red-clay when any one professes conversion, or of becoming what is sometimes spoken of as a School-Kafir, because he has discarded red ochre for civilized clothing.” The two gestures of threwing off the blanket and wading in the water to wash off the red ochre painted on the body became a symbolic representation of the African people’s entrance into modernity in the form Christianity. Once inside modernity, the New Africans discovered and realized that it was not only constituted by Western civilization and education, but also by repression, genocide, racism, colonialism and repression. On realizing the negative side of Christian modernity, some of the New Africans who came on the historical scene about three generations after Ntsikane such as Mangane Maake Mokone, James Dwane and others forged a particularized ‘African’ form of Christianity known as Ethiopianism. Ethiopianism was an attempt to construct African modernities in replacement of European modernities. It is to this religious and cultural tradition that Nontetha and her Church of the Prophetess Nontetha belong. The emergence of Ethiopianism caused an upheaval within the New African Movement because some of the powerful members of the New African intelligentsia were opposed to it: for instance John Langalibalele Dube through his newspaper Ilanga lase Natal, John Tengo Jabavu through his newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, and Walter Rubusana, Allan Kirkland Soga, Nathaniel Cyril Umhalla through their newspaper Izwi Labantu. It was practically left to the Ghanian (New African) in the Cape Town, F. Z. S. Peregrino, through his newspaper South African Spectator, to defend Ethiopianism as a form of Pan-Africanism. But the most spectacular defense of Ethiopianism was undertaken by (His Highness Prince) Bandele Omoniyi while completing his University studies in Britain. He writes the following in his book, A Defense of the Ethiopian Movement (Edinburgh, 1908): “The Ethiopian Movement is the result of the unsatisfactory work of the missionaries. Christianity we claim to be the vanguard of civilisation, and its true object we believe is to renovate, to purify and also to perfect the whole man by liberating his intellect, elevating his standard of duty, and developing to the full all his powers. Unfortunately for the natives their spiritual leaders deny the equality of men, and maintain ‘the dignity of labour’ in no better way than the British capitalists, which is something tantamount to slavery. Now and again they talk of ‘the blessings of civilisation,’ which is nothing short of the demoralisation of the natives by gin, oppression and disease. In the case of the natives it is a vice to be exacting and austere, but a merit in the case of the white men. They have appealed to the Eternal Power to assist them to crush the natives---even those natives who are thankful to, and praise, God for the Gospel message brought them through the Europeans. The natives think that if it is the bounden duty of the English people to preach the Gospel to them, it is also theirs to preach it to their own people; that there is no monopoly of God’s grace, to be good and acceptable, and the Bible is a universal book and God is a universal God, that no church, no creed, no particular tenets are His sole medium of communication with mankind.” In defense of the Bambata Rebellion of 1906, Bandele Omoniyi, writes further: “I hold that in resorting to active resistance against oppression, when that hope was finally withdrawn, they might plead human sympathies, broad, deep and legitimate, and that they committed no moral offence.” It is in the context of these complex web of historical interrelationships that Nontetha should be situate. The indomitability of her spirit is explained by a self-awareness of belonging to a great and resilient tradition. Her spirit and determination were broken even when she was imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals for approximately two decades. In a recent critical study of Nontetha, Robert R. Edgar and Hilary Sapire make these observations: “Nontetha was a minor religious figure who probably would not have come to our attention but for her collision with the state. She operated within a limited area, she attracted a relatively small following, and she never defined her mission in grandiose terms. . . . Because the story of Nontetha reflects just such a local perspective, it provides insights into the incremental ways that religious cultures evolve and illuminates how Africans in the eastern Cape engaged with Christianity. . . . As the figure at the center of a prophetic movement, Nontetha takes place among an impressive circle of African women who took active leadership roles in their churches and communities, rural homesteads, locations, or urban townships immediately after the First World War. . . . Although Nontetha and her followers did not define their movement in overt political terms, many of their ideas and the issues they raised overlapped with those of nationalist and trade union movements, in nearby East London. As noted above, they all could and did draw from a common pool of traditions, experiences, ideas, and images---for example, Ntsikana and his prophecies, the appeals to chiefs to play a constructive and unifying role in mobilizing Africans, and the expectations of Garveyite liberators” (African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, A Twentieth-Century South African Prophet, Ohio University Press, 2000). Nontetha became an item of international news more than sixty years after her death, two years before the end of the twentieth-century, when the New York Times reported on the successful effort of Robert R. Edgar and Hilary Sapire in locating her unmarked grave near Pretoria and removing her remains to near East London where she was reburied in accordance with the wishes of the members of the Church of Prophetess Nontetha: “The story of how Robert Edgar, a 50-year-old professor of African history at Howard, the historically black university in Washington, came to uncover the bones of a long-dead religious figure here is a triumphant tale of American-South African cooperation. And her village’s quest to get the new Government to release her body after the old Government had refused for six decades to part with it is a parable of change in South Africa, where black historical figures are finally getting the monuments that English and Afrikaner conquerors had long reserved for themselves.” Although Nontetha may have been a minor figure, she symbolizes a grand historical vision.