Today this most eminent critic of music within the New African Movement is not as well known as he deserves to be. Fortunately, Frieda Bokwe Matthews in her recently published and magnificent autobiography, Remembrances (1995), has given us a snippet portrait of Mark S. Radebe with other New African students (Z. K. Matthews, Rosebery Bokwe) at Fort Hare University in the 1920s: "The occasion was my 17th birthday, September 16th. My sister, Pearl, then a school teacher at the Lovedale Primary School, had arranged for a picnic to celebrate this and had asked Rosebery, my older brother, to organise a few friends at Fort Hare to be present. My sister wanted the party to be a surprise for me. So there I was surrounded by Rosebery's friends and their girlfriends mainly. Amongst the guests were Zac and Mark Radebe who were both my brother's closest friends, all older than I was and not very interesting, I thought. . . Rosebery always came home with his friend Mark who later married my sister Pearl. . . Mark was a brilliant pianist and excelled in all sporting activities. He was the second son of a well known family in Natal, held in high esteem for being the only African in the city of Pietermaritzburg who had his business and residence in the city." Indeed Mark S. Radebe, Jr., came from a very prominent family in Natal, because he was the son of Mark S. Radebe (1869-1924), Snr., who with others founded the African independent newspaper Ipepa lo Hlanga (The National Weekly Newspaper, 1894-1904) in Pietermaritzburg. In the 1930s Radebe made three outstanding cultural contributions to the New African Movement's preoccupation with the construction of modernity. First, for approximately two years he wrote a column in the weekly Umteteli wa Bantu under the pseudonym of 'Musicus'. His was the first serious and cionsistent music criticism by an African in South Africa. He principally theorized how African fol music could be a bridghead into modernity. Radebe thought European classical music had much in way of lessons for Africans. Like all New African intellectuals he was opposed to jazz's entrance into South Africa. They felt that jazz expressed and represented the unpalatable things of modernity. Having passionately embraced the Negro Spirituals a few decades earlier, they were historically at a loss as how could the New Negroes, whom they held in high esteem, could follow such a 'high invention' with such a 'low form'. The singular distinction of Mark S. Radebe from his colleagues within the New African Movement is that his opposition to jazz was based on an impressive grasp of music theory, if not necessarily the history of music, whereas his colleagues were largely ideologically reacting to a musical form whose structure they had no comprehension of. Secondly, being a composer and a pianist, he organized in 1931 the first African Musical Festival later known as the 'Transvaal Eisteddfod'. This enabled Radebe to disseminate music culture into wider geographical areas of South Africa which could not by other cultural means engage themselves with modernity. In becoming the Acting Chairman of the Eisteddfod in 1934, H. I. E. Dhlomo was participating another cultural form in bring the African people to the center of modernity, other than the theatrical form which then he was in the process of mastering. Radebe and Dhlomo organized many Eisteddfod competitions at the Bantu Men's Social Center in Johannesburg. Thirdly, in organizing and composing for the African Male Voice Choir which sang in a musical style called isicathamiya (male vocal style), whose principal exponent was the great composer Rueben Caluza, Mark S. Radebe enlarged and enriched the cultural splay in which the New African intellectuals, writers and artists could realize their ambitious modernistic objectives. Lastly, in being a producer and music scout for Columbia, like his friend Griffith Motsieloa was for Gallo, Mark Radebe, despite his elitist inclinations had to engage the popular culture of marabi musical form, however virulently hostile he was towards it. Given his important interactions with such major New African intellectuals such as Z. K. Matthews, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Rueben Caluza and others, it is clear that Mark S. Radebe was a central member of the New African Movement.