Gonarathnam “Kesaveloo” Goonam was one of the exytraordinary modernizers enabled by South Africa in the twentieth century. Belonging to the tradition in many ways facilitated by Charlotte Manye Maxeke, Goonam exerted herself to the fullest in actualizing one of the fundamental principles of this tradition that women can, should and must combine politics and education in order to optimize their making of modernity. Being an Indian woman of Tamil ancestry, Goonam inflected and/or articulated this “edict” in a distinctively different manner from what was possible for a Xhosa woman like Maxeke. Whereas Maxeke brought New Negro modernity through the philosophy of her teacher W. E. B. Du Bois to assist in the construction of South African modernity, Goonam participated in this construction by cultivating the philosophy of satyagraha which Mohandas Gandhi had founded in the country. But in order for both of them to participate in the making of a modern South Africa, they each had to make their respective educational detours: Maxeke studied under Du Bois at Wilberforce University in United States in the 1890s; Goonam became politically aware of India as part of the empire while studying medicine at the University of Ediburgh in the 1930s. In a certain sense, in the same manner that Du Bois made Maxeke politically aware of her Africanness, Gandhi enabled Goonam to come to a cultural realization of her Indianness. This consciousness of self identification had profound consequences for both of them: in contrast to Goonam who participated in the making of modernity in South Africa through the principles of Marxist philosophy, Maxeke aligned herself with Pan Africanist philosophy to facilitate this participation. These two distinct philosophies of modernity par excellence led them to the question of womanhood in modernity. It is not accidental that both of these great women separately from each other founded women's organization that negotiated a progressive position for women in modernity. It is unlikely that these women ever met because by the time Goonam left Durban for Edinburgh University in 1928, Maxeke was entering her last decade of life in poverty in Johannesburg . The tradition of women proselytizers of modernity initiated by Charlotte Manye Maxeke found memorable expression in Goonam's book Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography (1991). This revealing autobiography has affinities with other autobiographies by other descendants of Maxeke: Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985), Helen Joseph's Side by Side (1986), Maggie Resha's ‘Mangoana o Tsoara Thipa ka Bohaleng ( My Life in the Struggle , 1991), Phyllis Ntantala's A Life's Mosaic (1992), Frieda Bokwe Matthews' Remembraces (1995) and Mpho's M'atsepo Thunya's Singing Away The Hunger ( 1996). Although all of these autobiographies are similar in many ways in that they are centrally about the politics of the awakening of national consciousness of womanhood in modernity, Coolie Doctor has its particular diostinctiveness. One of the compelling things about Goonam's autobiography is the riverting struggle in her modernist imagination of contending forces of national, cultural and self-identification: Africanness vs Indianness; Marxism vs Nationalism. In the context of these contentious currents, one of the fascinating narrative seams of the book is the constant pull of Indian as a political and cultural experience as she struggles to negotiate the harmonious rapprochement of her Indianness and Africanness. Her several “flights” to India under the guise of seeking a peaceful political space to reflect on her “double-consciousness”, which W. E. B. Du Bois articulated under different modes in the American context, was the expression of this extraordinary and inevitable pull of India on her. Her constant returns to South Africa and the final settlement to unrelentingly battle apartheid was an acknowledgement that her Africanness superseded her Indianness. Her self referential as a “black person” in the autobiographical is constant reminder that Africanness is not synonymous with blackness. The eventual triumph against apartheid was predicated on this principle of political differentiation. The other tradition that made it impossible for Goonam to evade her Africanness and South Africaness was that of medical doctors who were at the forefront of the struggle to modernize and democratize the country through political practice besides through their scientific professionalism: she was always in this frontline with other medical doctors such as Abdullah Abdurahman, Silas Modiri Molema, Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker, all of whom studied at Edinburgh University. But the medical doctor who modernized the political imagination of the African people through transforming the organizational structure of the African National Congress was A. B. Xuma, who studied in United States in the context of New Negro modernity. Two political events conveyed in Coolie Doctor would seem to indicate why it proved so impossible for Goonam not to confront her South Africanness all the more so in the context of apartheid: the “Doctors' Pact” of March 1947, a memorandum of understanding between Yusuf Dadoo, A. B. Xuma and Monty Naicker that led to the forging on an alliance between the South African Indian Congress and the African National Congress, an alliance that was to eventuate in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, that included other organizations; Goonam's being sprung from jail for her first political activity by the young lawyer known by the name of Nelson Mandela in the late 1940s. Nelson Mandela possessed a streak of “Indianness” in his political consciousness by the virtue of having attempted to combine African nationalism and satyagraha. Mandela recognized himself as the foremost exponent of Gandhism in Africa in the twentieth century. Given this synthesis or attempted synthesis, Coolie Doctor seems to indicate that Indianness and Africanness are inseperable from each other in the political experience of South Africa in the twentieth century. By coming to South Africa in the late nineteenth century, from 1893 to 1914, Mohandas Gandhi forged the political consciousness of this inseparability.