From the moment of his arrival in South Africa in 1922 to establish the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) branches among African youth and college students to his departure back to United States in 1936, the New Negro intellectual Max Yergan had a profound effect on two generations of New African intellectuals, that of D. D. T. Jabavu and Z. K. Matthews, and that of Govan Mbeki. With D. D. T. Jabavu, Yergan interacted as a colleagues (although he he never taught at Fort Hare University), and to Govan Mbeki, who was then a student at this University, Yergan was a model of New Negroism to be emulated. In these fifteen years, Max Yergan shifted from being a New Negro to a New Africa and back to New Negroism. It was perhaps this exemplary nature of Max Yergan which convinced the New Africans of the close historical proximity between New Africanism and New Negroism: both of these ideologies were instruments of their respective entrance into modernity. A fascinating portrait of Max Yergan in South Africa has been sketched by David Henry Anthony III in his huge and as yet unpublished manuscript: A Pan-African Enigma: The Life and Times of Max Yergan, 1892-1975. One of its most invaluable contributions, the manuscript traces the genealogy of the idea or concept of the 'New Negro' as it revealed its imprinting on the consciousness and sensibility of Max Yergan. Most of the younger New African intellectuals viewed his practical activity in South Africa as a confirmation of the brilliance of New Negroism. It was in South Africa that Max Yergan shifted from Christian liberalism into a serious engagement with Marxism. Upon returning to United States, Yergan together with Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois and others founded the International Committee on African affairs (later better renowned as the Council on African Affairs) in 1937. The organization supported anti-colonial struggles in Africa as an expression of its socialist solidarity and anti-imperialist posture. When from 1948 onwards Max Yergan turned his back on Marxism, severed his relationship with the Council on African Affairs, this came as an absolute shock to New African intellectuals such as I. B. Tabata, Z. K. Matthews, Yusuf Dadoo. This apostasy was so unpalatable that the young Govan Mbeki had difficulty in admitting that it was Max Yergan who had converted him to Marxism and Communism. All of this bespeaks of the deep impressions the pre-1941 Max Yergan left in South Africa. On the occasion of paying a short visit to United States in 1926, after living continuously in South Africa for four years, D. D. T. Jabavu in an Editorial in Imvo Zabantsundu paid him the following extraordinary tribute: “Five years ago [actually four] the Young Men’s Christian Association of the Negro people of the United States of America sent out to South Africa, . . . a Negro representative to work among the Bantu college students for their spiritual upliftment. This was the Rev. Max Yergan B. A. (Shaw University), a worthy representative of the more advanced Negroes. His mission was to work as a Travelling Secretary of the Students’ Christian Association in the Native secondary institutions of South Africa and at the same time as organiser of the Teachers’ Christian Association (Native Branch). He first encountered Governmental  obstacles from the Immigration Department, obstacles curiously against all men of colour whatever their mission may be; whilst free ingress is granted to all types of European anarchists and unscupulous propagandists whose white skin is alone a sufficient passport to enter South Africa. After overcoming these difficulties which had delayed him by lwelve months, he proved so satisfactory an immigrant that he was spontaneously granted domicile rights by the present Government. His occupation is to visit all Native secondary schools in the Union and Basutoland, delivering addresses of spiritual uplift, and organising our young men and women on Christian principles. As a scholar he is a man of first rank University education, combining resourceful erudition with an exemplary Christian character, a large mind, forceful oratory and genial dispositions---in fact an all round educated gentleman. He does noe effectany of the rhetorical fireworks of Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey, but possesses a concentrating and confident temperament so essential to an organiser. As a wise speaker, he has actually attracted the attention of several European schools  and been invited to speak before white students at Pretoria, Stellenbosch and Cape Town, creating for himself a welcome and a favourable impression. He is domestically located at Alice where his splendid home is popularly frequented by his European and Native neighbors. His organisation within the short time of five years constitutes a remarkable record. . . He publishes a monthly News Letter which circulates among the members of the Students’ Chistian Association conveying inspiring messages. As a preacher and lecturer he will never be forgotten by those who had the privilege of listening to his series of lectures on Social Work during the 1923 Winter School at Lovedale and Fort Hare, not to mention the adresses he gives from time to time in his wide travels throughout the Union” (“Max Yergan”, April 27, 1926). By bringing the exemplary nature of New Negro modernity into South Africa, Max Yergan not only had a profound effect on young College students, but also on New African intellectuals. Yergan’s influence on some prominent New African intellectuals of the New African Movement is apparent as can be judged by their participation in a major conference he organised at Fort Hare College in Alice in 1930 entitled “Bantu and European Student Christian Conference”. This Conference has become historic because it brought together a large contigent of New African intellectuals. It could with justice be characterized as most important conference in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth-century on the spirit and zeitgeist of modernity and its attendant problems. Among the New African intellectuals who participated in it were: H. I. E. Dhlomo, Charlotte Manye Maxeke, Alfred B. Xuma, D. D. T. Jabavu, John Gumede, Z. K. Matthews. Praising Max Yergan for organising such a momentous event, H. I. E. Dhlomo summarized its theme as reflected in the surrounding context of Fort Hare College itself: “Fort Hare, on the other hand, stands out bold, challenging, majestic, ‘open,’ modern and ‘exposed’. There is no gloom  or melancholy in its sunlit, airy nakedness. The contrast adds beauty to the landscape. The picture of the surrounding country, congested with poor Native  huts standing amid untilled or partly tilled lands, fills one with surprise and indignation. Right here we have heathen people living their old fashioned life, impervious and even hostile to the teachers of modern life. It is indeed a ghastly contrast of ignorance and education; modernity and heathenism; advancement and retrogression. The people are poverty-stricken. The Conference brought together people different in colour, thought, creeds and ideals. It was unique both in diversity and in unity. There were delegates not only from South African European Universities and from Bantu colleges, but from India, America and Britain. There were read letters from various parts of the world testifying to the world-wide significance of the conference. The occasionpresented a fine picture of harmony, reciprocity, enthusiasm and eagerness. Every delegate, white or non-white, was as free as air, and it was interesting to observe how Bantu girls, although still retaining their softness, delicacy and charm, have outgrown that obtrusive taciturnity and uncouth, embarrasing coyness which formerly characterised Bantu womanhood” (“An Impression”, Umteteli wa Bantu, July 12, 1930). Dhlomo was fascinated by the historical figure of Max Yergan as representing the proximity between New Negro modernity and New African modernity. Writing approximately twenty years after these reflections on the aforementioned Conference, H. I. E. Dhlomo, meditating on the political duel between Paul Robeson and Max Yergan concerning the dialectic of Marxism and modernity in black culture, wondered what lessons it had for New African modernity: “The American Negro has many problems similar to those of the African. One of these is the struggle for full citizenship rights, and the techniques and methods to achieve this object. Like Africans, the Negroes are often sharply divided and usually quarrel among themselves about the strategy and methods. Booker T. Washington’s philosophy and techniques were often attacked by Dr. Du Bois and his camp. Those differences still exist. They touch almost every phase of Negro life. For instance, one of the great differences between outstanding writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes is that Hughes believes in Communism, and Cullen refuses to be purely a “racial and protest” poet. There is the same difference between the Council of African affairs and the National Association fot the Advancement of Coloured People. Recently, at the World Peace Conference in Paris, Mr. Paul Robeson, the famous singer, said, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations” agaist a country “which in one generation has raisedour people to the full dignity of mankind.” In a letter to the New York Herald Tribune, Dr. Max Yergan (who once lived in South Africa) takes Robeson to task for this statement. He says Robeson is Communist dominated and does not speak for the American Negroes who, as a whole, have resisted being proselytized despite all communist propaganda and effort. Yergan says the Negroes, like other Americans, want peace, but if war comes, they will not betray their country (and they have not done so in all history), but respond to its call. The efforts of the communists, Yergan goes on, to make the Negroes think they are a “nation” are ridiculous, and he resents and castigates them forposing as spokesmen for the Negroes who know what they want and how to get it. And they are winning their battle for citizenship rights on their own. Yergan asks what the communists have done, and what they can do, for the Negroes. Denying that communists have raised anybody to, or that they themselves have experienced, the “full dignity of mankind,” Yergan says, “Most of them are, by every test, the slaves of slaves.” (“Items About the Negroes”, X [H. I. E. Dhlomo], Ilanga lase Natal, June 18, 1949). By the time of this statement, Max Yergan had already left the Council of African Affairs, which he had founded and launched together with Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s (that is, upon Max Yergan’s permanent return from South Africa). From this rabid anti-Communism Yergan drifted rightwards to the most extreme reactionary positions of supporting the institutionalization of Apartheid in South Africa by the ‘victorious’ Natal Party in 1948. In the 1960s Max Yergan supported the right-wing Senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona who advocated using nuclear weapons to stop the progression of the Vietnamese Revolution. From the late 1940s onwards many of the New African intellectuals of the New African Movement who had known Max Yergan in the 1920s and in the 1930s politically disowned him and completely repudiated his political philosophy. Among the most uncompromising in this rejection was Govan Mbeki who had been influenced by Max Yergan in the 1930s in embracing Marxism.