It is astonishing on restrospective reflection that in the two best intellectual portraits of New African intellectuals or the New African Movement in the twentieth-century, Isaiah Shembe is not given his due historical recognition: in neither T. D. Mweli Skota’s monumental The Yearly African Register (1930) nor in Z. K. Matthews brilliant “Our Heritage” (a series of biographical and intellectual sketches of the New Africans which appeared in Imvo Zabantsundu newspaper from June 3rd to November 21, 1960) is he mentioned. But his historical importance in relation to modernity was recognized by other intellectuals within the New African Movement. For instance, John Langalibelele Dube, one of the most preeminent New African intellectuals, wrote a short biography of him as a historical tribute within a year of his death: uShembe (1936). It is interesting to note that while Dube accepted and was sympathetic to the Nazaritism of Isaiah Shembe, he was unrelentingly hostile to the Ethiopianism of Mangane Maake Mokone, James Dwane and others, failing to recognize that both these ideologies of African independent churches were a search for the authentic forms of African modernities. Both Ethiopianism and Nazaritism were the quintessential expressive forms of African modernity. The Hymns of Shembe may turn out to have been among the most dramatic expressions of African modernism. At present the more historically renown reputation of Isaiah Shembe is that of the healer, prophet and founder of the Church of Nazarites. Perhaps the reason why Shembe had greater influence among the Zulu people (or nation) in the first half of the twentieth-century than any kind of leadership was because his Church was the combination of the ideologies of Zionism (this is not in any way related to modern Jewish Zionism) and Ethiopianism: the combination of the nationalist philosophies of the Africa is for the Africans formulation and the millenarianism of the apocalyptic and nativistic. It is not accidental therefore that Isaiah Shembe was known among his people as a ‘Black Christ’. Absalom Vilakazi formulates the seminal perspective that Shembe and his ecclesiastical movement were principally preoccupied with ‘the regeneration of Zulu society’ (M. A. thesis [1954], The Church of the Nazarites, Hartford University, Connecticut). Isaiah Shembe, who founded his movement in 1911, may have borrowed the historical concept of regeneration from Pixley ka Isaka Seme’s great manifesto of 1903-5 which initiated the New African Movement: ‘The Regeneration of Africa’. The concept of regeneration was a historical construct about the necessity of creating African modernities. In the same way that Pixley  Seme appropriated the idea of regeneration from from two African American intellectuals of the nineteenth-century, Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell, Isaiah Shembe may have borrowed the philosophy of Zionism from the white American founder of the Zion order in United States, John Alexander Dowie. The Hymns of Isaiah Shembe, which have not received the kind of attention they deserve, are a fascinating intermixture of African modernistic sensibilities and Christianity. In this sense, Shembe was a modernizer. Given the critial acuity of H. I. E. Dhlomo and Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, it would be of enormous revelation to know what they made of this great historical figure. In his magisterial dissertation, Benedict Vilakazi mentions the historical figure of Isaiah Shembe in the context of John Langalibalele Dube’s uShembe: “Shembe is the work of a man who writes searchingly and contrives to be extraordinarily vivid. There is a philosophic mind in the critical outlook of Shembe’s form of religion, and the writer unconsciously admires Shembe as a man of principle and achievement in putting his religious ideals before the world. The inclusion of Shembe’s psalms in this biography is a further proof that Dube knows how to select the best when he sees and hears it. In this one sees one great man depicting the life of another, a mixture on inspired thought and sublime expression” (The Oral and Written Literature in Nguni, doctoral dissertation, University of Witwatersrand, 1946, p. 298). The very fact that H. I. E. Dhlomo, who possessed arguably the greatest modernist mind in twentieth-century South Africa, had nothing to say about Isaiah Shembe in his voluminous and extraordinary writings, the one remarkable figure who held the imagination of the largest portion of the Zulu nation captive for several decades (think here of Marcus Garvey in Harlem in the 1920s) in its struggle between modernity and tradition, can only bespeak to Dhlomo’s belief that Isaiah Shembe was fundamentally a traditional man who has forced by historical forces to make impotent gestures towards modernity. But the Hymns of Isaiah Shembe speak otherwise as to the complicated nature of modernity, the very modernity Dhlomo profoundly loved.