This New African Movement website was constructed under the influence of some of the most fascinating intellectuals and artists of the twentieth-century: Henry E. Sigerist (the Swiss medical historian), Manfredo Tafuri (the Italian architectural historian), C. L. R. James (the Trinidadian historian of Jacobinian revolutions), Cesar Vallejo (the Peruvian Communist poet), and Frantz Fanon (the historian of African Revolutions in the twentieth-century). Predominating over all of these influences and formations is that of the New African intellectual H. I. E. Dhlomo (the South African cultural historian of the New African Movement).

The following four monographs or long essays in their very peculiarity are an attempted explanation of the rationale or necessity of this website on the New African Intellectuals of the New African Movement.

Nairobi, the Capital of African Political Exiles in the 1960s.

(The essay is a retrospective reconstruction twenty-five years after the fact of my intellectual formation in the turbulent era of Third World revolutions [from the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to the Angolan Revolution of 1975]. The revolutions were the 1960s in Africa. The essay attempts to recapture how it was like at the ages between 16 and 19 years to read and see for the first time the great books and films of that historical moment: Regis Debray's Revolution on the Revolution?, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Miklos Jansco's The Round-Up (1965), Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre Le Fou (1965), Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Revolutionary hope was the order of the day then in Africa. Modernity then seemed to be in synchrony with African history. Yet at the same time in the 1960s Africa and Modernity were already moving in different trajectories, but this seemed invisible in the context of the euphoria and triumphalism of this extraordinary decade. The crisis of Africa in relation Modernity continues even in the present (the year 2002, in the new millenium).

Henry Sigerist (1891-1957):Medicine as an Intellectual Enteprise. (This essay forms part of a book called INTERNATIONALISM AND NATIONALISM IN
MEDICINE: HENRY SIGERIST, published by Africa World Press, 2005).

(With the crisis of Marxism as an intellectual system that supposedly explained history signaled by the historic events of 1989, the question has become what is to be done by those who thought of it as a philosophy of history. The work [approximately 14 books and many programmatic essays on the history of medicine in obscure German and Swiss medical history journals of the 1920s] of this great Swiss medical historian read between 1991 and 1993 provided a new framework to this author for conceptualizing intellectual history. In this Henry Sigerist is superior to Michel Foucault. The first approximately six pages of the essay were written in 1991 and the rest in 1993. The Sigeristian art of writing monographs is a methodology and perspective that I have employed in analyzing the intellectual and artistic work of the New African Intellectuals of the New African Movement. Henry Sigerist is fundamental to my present intellectual preoccupations as Cesar Vallejo had been to my earlier intellectual searchings.)

The Cultural Modernity of H. I. E. Dhlomo. (This essay now is a monograph called THE CULTURAL MODERNITY OF H. I. E. DHLOMO, published
by Africa World Press, 2005).

(This monograph of all H. I. E. Dhlomo's cultural, political and intellectual essays written between 1924 and 1954 in largely New African newspapers such as Umteteli wa Bantu [The Mouthpiece of the People], The Bantu World [The African World], Inkundla ya Bantu [Bantu Forum] and Ilanga lase Natal [The Natal Sun], served as a model of how to write a 'Sigeristian' monograph analyzing the work of the most important New African figures such R. V. Selope Thema, S. E. K. Mqhayi, Solomon T. Plaatje, Jordan Kush Ngubane and others. The Sigeristian principles of monographic form were synthesized with the poetics of essay writing as practized by Octavio Paz. Paz's extraordinary book, The Children of the Mire, which was originally a series of lectures given at Harvard University, made understandable to this author for the first time the structure of European modernity and modernism. This monograph on H. I. E. Dhlomo is an attempted construction of the nature of the counter-narrative of New African modernity that Dhlomo formulated. Elsewhere it will be necessary to postulate the structure of Dhlomo's New African modernism.)

The Transatlantic Connections of the New African Movement. (This essay now forms part of a book called BLACK MODERNITY: DISCOURSES BETWEEN UNITED STATES AND SOUTH AFRICA, published by Africa World Press, 2005).

(The essay attempts to trace the process(es) and the structure of the political, cultural, intellectual, philosophical, literary and religious connections between African Americans and Africans across the Atlantic from the 1880s [the moment of the Xhosa Cultural Renascence in South African intellectual history] to the 1950s [the moment of the Sophiatown Renaissance in South African intellectual history]. Although it was the missionaries as representatives of European imperialism and colonialism who initiated the process of modernistic awareness among Africans, it was only upon appropriating the historical lessons of African Americans in United States modernity that the Africans in South became historically conscious of their ability to effect the making of South African modernity by articulating and defending their interests. It was in defining themselves as "New Africans" in emulation of the "New Negroes" and in seeking to create a "New African modernity" in parallel with "New Negro modernity" that the Africans transformed their praxis which was so fundamental in the making of modernity in South Africa. What kind of modernity this was to be was at the center of all contestations in South Africa in the twentieth-century!)

The Revolutionary Marxist Vision of C. L. R. James. (This essay now forms part of a collection of essays called EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE: THE LAST INTELECTUAL OF THE NEW AFRICAN MOVEMENT and OTHER ESSAYS, forthcoming from Africa World Press).

(This essay was written in West Berlin in the late 1980s, approximately three years before the death of the great intellectual in 1989. Although I had read many of his writings (Black Jacobins (1938), Beyond a Boundary (1962) and many essays) in the 1970s while a student at the University of California in Los Angeles, it was while reading Modern Politics (consisting of public lectures that James had given at a Public Library in Post-of-Spain, Trinidad in the late 1950s) in the great German city that James awakened in me a historical awareness of the importance of modernity. While this book was surprisingly wholly preoccupied with, in fact a celebration of, European modernity, it had an impact on me totally out of proportion with its importance within the Jamesonian canon. Reading Modern Politics simultaneously with his other book about Africa, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, made me aware that the fundamental problem in Africa was the incompleteness of modernity as a historical experience. This 'breakthrough' shifted my focus from the poetics of Marxism to the philosophy of African intellectual history. It was H. I. E. Dhlomo who pointed the direction.)