Although Enoch S. Guma's date of birth is in dispute, with some dating it in 1896, there can be little doubt that he was a prodigy of some kind. He may well have been our Raymond Radiguet. The French prodigy died of typhoid in 1923 and ours in the influenza epidemic of 1918.  What Jean Cocteau said of Radiguet, illuminates also the tragic short life of Guma: "Raymond Radiguet appeared. He was fifteen years old and claimed to be eighteen, which mixed up his biographers. . . . If I talk to you at length about Radiguet and his book, it is because he seems to me one of the best examples of that attitude I would rather outline for you than extinguish br defining. . . . this child prodigy astonishes us by his lack of mostrosity. Rimbaud may be explained up to a point by the nightmares and the enchantments of childhood. One wonders where this bespangled magician puts his hands. Radiguet works with his sleeves rolled up, in full delight" (cited in Raymond Radiguet by James P. McNab [1984]). One of those astonished by Guma into recollection approximately half a century later, was the very distinguished Xhosa poet, James J. J. Jolobe, with whom he had been in a Teachers' Training College: "Another thing which had a great influence on my writing---when we were at St. Matthew's, there was a student who suddenly disappeared from the institution. It was strange to us sometimes, how it happened that he could disappear and then come back to school. Then, suddenly, one weekend, it was announced that this young man had published a book, uNomalizo. It was a great thrill to students, because there were very few books at the time. . . . " What is even more surprising is that Kofi Awoonor related to Njabulo Ndebele at a conference in Europe that he had read this Xhosa novel as a young boy in Ewe language in Ghana.  Guma's novella, uNomalizo, okanye izinto zalomhlaba ngamajingiqiwe (Nomalizo, or the things of this life are sheer vanity [1918]), was the first literary text to represent our historical experience in absolutizing binaric structure of Manichaeism in which the Africanism of traditional societies was devil incarnate in contrast to the spiritual serenity of the Christian civilizing mission. Enoch Guma founded a literary tradition which was to be epitomized in Thomas Mofolo's great novel Chaka. This literary tradition was contested, and perhaps made to retreat by Mazisi Kunene's monumental epic Emperor Shaka The Great in which tradition and modernity are articulated in a complexly nuanced modulation. Nevertheless, Enoch S. Guma was an important marker in our literary history.