As a journalist, Jordan Kush Ngubane had no peer within the New African Movement. For that matter, few, if any, journalists on the African continent, possessed the power of his intellect. His precociousness was recognized Ngazana Lutuli, editor of Ilanga lase Natal, who gave him a column called 'Jo the Cow' in 1938, when Ngubane was barely pass his twentieth year. In the previous year, while still a student at Adams College, Ngubane contributed a short philosophical text arguing against materialism and rationalism as proper, let alone correct, explanatory systems of history. He aligned himself with Christian cosmological systems. The intellectual energy of the piece was not easily obviated by its brevity. This intellectual debut was prescient in that it announced a theme that was to resonate through all Jordan Ngubane's writings for approximately the following half a century: his virulent hostility to the 'materialism' of Marxism and Communism in the name od the 'idealism' and 'spiritualism' of African Nationalism. Ngubane religiously wrote this weekly column for the next three years. Just before departing from Natal to join R. V. Selope Thema as his assistant editor in the Bantu World in Johannesburg in the early 1940s, Ngubane wrote a review of H. I. E. Dhlomo's Valley Of A Thousand Hills in Ilanga lase Natal in which he praised this short epic as representing the 'national spirit' of modernity. In praising it in such a manner, Ngubane was perhaps alluding to the Romantic poetic strain that was to predominate in Dhlomo's work. This appreciation was an important intervention because it indicates that there were intellectual discoures within the New African Movement constituting it as a cultural movement. H. I. E. Dhlomo's review of T. Mweli Skota's The African Yearly Register, a text giving collective voice to New African modernity, in Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1930s, and also his appreciative appraisal of Benedict Vilakazi's Amal' Ezulu poems in Ilanga lase Natal in the 1940s was part of this configuring the intellectual space of Movement. A. C. Jordan's translations of Vilakazi's poems from Zulu to Xhosa in Africa South in the 1950s was also part of this ordering the expansiveness of its cultural space. The two or three years Jordan Ngubane spent with R. V. Selope Thema in the early 1940s in the Bantu World were to be fundamental in the former's intellectual formation in two ways. Firstly, although by this time Selope Thema had exhausted himself as a journalist in Bantu World, Ngubane came to recognize that Selope Thema in Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1920s had been a representative of a great African journalistic tradition encompassing John Tengo Jabavu's Imvo Zabantsundu in the 1880s, F. Z. S. Peregrino's South African Spectator in the 1900s, Solomon T, Plaatje's Tsala ea Becoana in 1910s, among others. It was in schooling himself in this journalistic tradition, and in transforming in the 1940s of Inkundla ya Bantu, as editor, into the political voice of the ANC Youth League, that Jordan Kush Ngubane became a great journalist of remarkable intellectual power. His theorizations on the nature of African Nationalism had no parallel anywhere in South Africa. Secondly, he learned from his master that there could be no compromise between African Nationalism and Communism: between them there could only be an unending Manichean struggle. The resignation of R. V. Selope Thema from the ANC in 1952, an organization he had founded with others in 1912, signaled to Jordan Ngubane to launch an all out war against what he perceived as a disastrous influence of Marxism and the South African Communist Party within the higher echelons of the ANC. His columns and articles in the Liberal newspaper Contact and in Manilil Gandhi's Indian Opinion, both in the 1950s, were filled with venomous intellectual violence. Two consequences followed from: Ngubane's total break with Albert Luthuli, then President-General of the ANC, who had been his teacher in Adams College in the 1930s, and had served him as a personal secretary in the 1940s; Nelson Mandela in Liberation and Ruth First in Fighting Talking responded with full force to Ngubane's violent provocations. The defeat of the African people by white nationalism at the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960s, gave Jordan Kush Ngubane a life-time intellectual and political project: the search for why and how Afrikaner Nationalism had defeated African Nationalism: a quest for a metaphysical system to anchor African Nationalism for the up coming rounds with Afrikaner Nationalism concerning the determination of South African history.  All his books from the moment of his exile in 1963, his return to South Africa in 1980, to his death in 1985, were part of what he perceived as a monumental national project: An African Explains Apartheid (1963); Ushaba (1974); The       Mind (1979). Even his biographical sketches of the architects white nationalism and pioneers of Apartheid such Smuts, Hertzog, Malan, Strijdom and others were part of this national undertaking (the contributions are in The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia Of World Biography, 12 volumes, New York, 1973).