Albert Thomas Nzula in his short life of 29 years which was characterized by unrelenting political activity and unending intellectual quests exemplifies in an extraordinary way the dialectical unity and struggle of Marxism and African Nationalism within the New African Movement. Not that he was ever tempted by African Nationalism from his Marxist convictions, but rather that his pedagogical activities and political engagements enabled him to intersect with the strongest centers or forces of African Nationalism. When Nzula moved from the Orange Free State in the late 1920s to take a teaching post at the Wilberforce Institute at Kilnerton, which had been founded years earlier by Charlotte Manye Maxeke and her husband Marshall Maxeke, respectively a great apostle of modernity and a former editor of Umteteli wa Bantu who had advocated is his columns in the newspaper a middle course or liberal position in political matters, he encountered an ideology which they both represented that African Nationalism should be the living philosophy of African modernities. In Charlotte Manye Maxeke, Nzula encountered a historical consciousness proclaiming modernity was the fundamental historical project of the moment. From her also, he came to recognize the significance of pedagogics in the realization of such a project. Since Charlotte Manye Maxeke as well Marshall Maxeke had been students of W. E. B. Du Bois at Wilberforce Univerity in Ohio in the late 1890s, it is certain that Albert Nzula through them experienced the effects of the influence of New Negro modernity on New African modernity. It was while teaching at Wilberforce Institute that Albert Nzula for the first time encountered the philosophy of Marxism and the politics of Communism. Henceforth for Albert Nzula, his philosophical outlook and political activities were to be inseparable from the unity of Marxism and modernity, contra the unity of African Nationalism and modernity in the Maxeke’s. Although Albert Nzula had previously witnessed the unity of African Nationalism and modernity as a secretary of the local branch of Clement Kadalie’s Industrialand Commercial Workers Union (ICU), it was in the context of the unity of Marxism and modernity that he realized and fulfilled to the utmost his potential as a political leader and as a New African intellectual. It is not surprising that within a short period of arriving in Kilnerton (a town in the Johannesburg industrial district), he became the first African Secretary-General of the South African Communist Party (SAPC). In 1929 he had become the acting editor of the Party newspaper Umsebenzi (‘Work’). At this moment, the priod of the decline of the ICU and the relative moribund nature of the African National Congress (ANC), Albert Nzula was involved with other alternative organizations: League of African Rights and the Federation of Non-European Trade Unions.  Working with these organizations should not imply that Albert Nzula was not a member of the ANC. In fact, he worked very closely John Gumede, then President-General of the organization, who attempted to give it a progressive and internationalist cast. When he went to Moscow in the early 1930s to further his political education, Albert Nzula not only witnessed the complicated historical relation between Sovietism and modernity, which fascinated Walter Benjamin, but also played a role in the relation between Sovietism and Africanism within the context of modernity. Principally attached to the Research Association for National and Colonial Problems (NIANKP) within the vast body of the Comintern, Albert Nzula worked very closely with George Padmore who was the principal editor of the organization’s newspaper outlet, The Negro Worker, which was based in Hamburg, Germany. In his articulations in this intellectual and political forum of the international workers’ movement, Nzula theorized his understanding of modernity which was contradistinction to that of Charlotte Manye Maxeke and that of Marshall Maxeke: whereas the latter two sought to align New African modernity with New Negro modernity, Albert Nzula sought to affiliate New African modernity with the international proletarian movement; whereas the latter two, in line with their middle-class values and perspectives, aimed at creating an intellectual space in which the newly forged New African Talented Tenth would lead the African masses, Albert Nzula made possible a historical space through proletarian political practice whereby the New African Masses could by means of their praxis transcend the particular toward the universal. Albert Nzula demanded that class politics be the perspective from which to view and transform African modernities, rather than interpret them from the viewpoint of racial identifications, as was the case with most of New African intellectuals. Although it is not entirely certain, it would seem that it was perhaps this incompatible understanding of modernity, since it had deep implications for pedagogical practices, between the Maxekes and Nzula, that compelled the two senior New African intellectuals either to dismiss or request the resignation of their ‘protégé’. It is possible that Albert Nzula resigned out of his own volition recognizing and giving cognisance to the primacy of Marxism over pedagogics at that particular historical moment. Once he moved from the ‘national’ stage of South Africa to the ‘international’ forum of the International Communist Movement in Moscow, Albert Thomas Nzula had to orient himself to the dynamic or duality of Marxism and Pan-Africanism around the issues of colonialism and internationalism. Coming from an intellectually advanced form of modernity in the Caribbean (represented in 1930s by Jean-Price Mars and Jacque Romain in Haiti, Rene Maran and Aime Cesaire in Martinique, Juan Marinello, Alejo Carpentier and Nicolas Guillen in Cuba, C. L. R. James in Trinidad), George Padmore coming from Trinidad made this dualism a central concern for all African intellectuals (in the world-wide sense) affiliated with the international workers movement. This dynamic of Marxism and Pan-Africanism revolved within the context of the fissure between Stalinism and Trotskyism. Moving between Moscow, where he was studying and doing research at the Eastern Workers Communist University (KUTVU) which resulted in the book The Working Class Movement and Forced Labour in Black Africa (co-written with his Russian professors, [1933]), and Hamburgh, where he was assisting George Padmore with editing The Negro Worker, Albert Nzula lived his short life without recognizing or experiencing the antinomies between Marxism and Pan-Africanism. It was within a few years of his death in Moscow, when Stalinism made the International Workers’ Movement serve Soviet Union foreign policy interests, that Marxism and Pan-Africanism broke asunder in the person in the person George Padmore. When this happened in the late 1930s, Padmore rejected the political philosophy Marxism to served the practical politics of Pan-Africanism, a break which he was to memorialize in his book Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956). It is really fascinating to know what choices Albert Thomas Nzula would have made had he lived to witness this historical break. In all likelihood he would have embraced Marxism and rejected Pan-Africanism! Though he lived a short life of only 29 years, Albert Thomas Nzula embodied in his person life the intellectual affiliations and political practices that centrally characterized the historical forces of his time: Communism and/or Pan-Africanism and Marxism and/or African Nationalism. Because of this, perhaps Albert Thomas Nzula engaged in his political practices the question of modernity much deeper than any other New African intellectual within the New African Movement.