In his fascinating geneological construction of New African intellectual history from John Tengo Jabavu to Pixley ka Isaka Seme  in Imvo Zabantsundu (June 3 to November 21, 1961), Z. K. Matthews noted the following observations concerning Paul Xiniwe: “One of the best known buildings in King William’s Town is the Temperance Hotel. For generations this hotel has been a home away from home for many thousands of Africans, who, for one reason or another have had occasion to pay a visit to King William’s Town. Some have spent a night or two there, others have had a meal or two there, while others have gone in there just to rest their feet after a round of busy shopping in the town. One wonders how many of those who have had the benefit of this place ever spare a thought of gratitude to Paul Xiniwe, who established this home for Africans many years ago. Like so many of his contemporaries Paul Xiniwe was educated at Lovedale where he qualified as a primary school teacher. After he left Lovedale he entered the teaching profession and taught at various schools in the Eastern Cape. Eventually he decided to give up teaching and to blaze a new trail for Africans in business. This he did at a time when the belief was still widely held that no African could run a business successfully. . . . But the Temperance Hotel was not merely a business place. It was a centre of culture. Both Paul Xiniwe and his wife were capable musicians. In their younger days they had both been members of an African Choir which toured Europe and they always encouraged music in their home and in the district” (“Paul Xiniwe blazed new trail for Africans”, Imvo Zabantsundu, October 7, 1961). The other members of the African choir were Eleanor Xiniwe (wife of Paul), Johanna Jonkers, Josiah Semouse, Charlotte Manye (Maxeke). These young New Africans seem to have been inspired by the visit of the New Negro Orpheus McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers who visited South Africa in 1890 singing all forms of Negro Spirituals. In appropriating the Negro Spirituals, Charlotte Manye Maxeke and others were among the earliest who established a Black Atlantic connection between New Negro modernity and New African modernity. Having later studied at Wilberfoce University under the guidance of W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Manye Maxeke was to become one the greatest South African modernizers. While in London to record and perform with the others, Paul Xiniwe was given an opportunity to pen an autobiographical self-portrait which appeared in the Illustrated London News of July 1891, as part of publicizing themselves to the English public: “I was born in November 1857, of Christian parents. I attended school from my youth, and contributed in some measure to the cost of my education by doing some domestic work for an English family before and after hours. This materially assisted my mother in paying the school fees and for my clothing. At fifteen years of age I left school and entered the service of the Telegraph Department as lineman, having to look after the poles and wires, and to repair breakages, by climbing the poles in monkey-like fashion. Being transferred to the Graaff Reinet Office, 130 miles from home, I had to go there alone, without knowledge of the road, or of any person there; but I go there in three days travelling on horseback. The officer in charge at Graaff Reinet found my handwriting better than that of the European clerks, and, in consequence, gave me his books to keep, with additional pay, and any amount of liberty in about the office. This was a privilege which I highly valued and turned to the best advantage by studying the code-books, taking them home to pore over them at night, and coming to the office about two hours before opening time, as I kept the keys, to learn, privately, the art of telegraphy. I surprised the master and the clerks one day by telling them that I could work the instrument, and, to dispel their serious doubts went through the feat to their great astonishment, but, happily, also, to the pleasure of my master. After three years’ service I left the post of lineman, quitted Graaff Reinet, and was employed on the railway construction as telegraph clerk, timekeeper, and storekeeper: a highly respectable and responsible post for a native to hold. When I left school and home I only had a little knowledge of the ‘three R’s’; but I was assiduous in improving my learning and seeking to qualify myself for a higher position. I had now earned a good sum of money on the railway, as well as a good name, as the testimonials I hold from there could show. Still desirous of greater improvement, I went to Lovedale, and held the office of telegraphist also in that institution, which helped me to pay my college fees. I stayed there two years, and passed the Government teachers’ examination, being one of only two who passed from the institution out of twenty-two candidates presented. I then took charge of a school at Port Elizabeth, which I kept for four years, and which I gave up to carry on business at King William’s Town, until the period of joining the ‘African Choir’“. This treatise states or implies the three historical vectors which were at the center of New African modernity: Christianity, education, and Western civilization. Moreover, Paul Xiniwe exemplified those qualities of determination, thriftiness, postponement of gratification, hard work, which were necessary to succeed in capitalist modernity. These were the qualities that enthralled Z. K. Matthews about Paul Xiniwe. In his determination to get the best education that Lovedale could offer, Xiniwe is comparable to R. V. Selope-Thema, the former junior colleague by thirty years. The ‘African Choir’ stay in London turned out to be a fiasco, with charges and counter-charges being thrown about between the white South African administrators (organizers) and the African performers, as we can gather from this letter from Paul Xiniwe to John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu , denying libelous  charges against him and seeking to clarify the whole imbroglio: “The history of the choir dates from Kimberley when about fifteen Natives voices---male and female were got together to go to England. They had two or three concerts at Kimberley which were a financial success, and the promoters failing even then to fulfil their engagements to the Native members, the majority withdrew, and thus they left Kimberley with four Natives only, hoping to pick up others as they travelled south, and depending upon me for the most part to secure the full number. On arriving here [in Cape Town] they made us believe that the four from Kimberley were the chosen, instead of only those who would go with them. They arrived in this division perfect strangers to me---I mean the four Europeans. I was the means of their introduction to Lovedale, as well as obtaining the majority of the members of the choir,---as their letters and telegrams to me could easily demonstrate. To show also how much they depended upon me, they undertook to pay me in the Colonial tour as much again as the other members of the choir, and half as much in the English tour. The African Choir first consisted of one European, and then three with another remarkable gentleman travelling independently with the choir to see whether it was a good paying concern befor putting his money---of which he had a plethora it was said unto us---into the venture, and with him at our backs our craft would go ahead. At Kimberley (return visit) a contract was entered between the members of the choir and the managers. The goose that laid the golden egg being now at the helm. In this contract they engaged inter-alia to pay me so much per week or per month and pay all extras; and yet when it came to going unpaid for months, and we demanded our salaries in England, they quibbled by saying---they understood that we were to be paid out of the proceeds,---a fallacious argument if not a gross misrepresentation of truth---because it is logically true that it we were to share in the loss, we had also to share in the profits, and thus become partners in the affair, which was not the case. . . . The venture of the African Choir was a monetary speculation in spite of all the platform declaration, and if as such it had gone before the public, nobody would say aught against the trio, but the financial expectations were not realised, and as soon as they went to Christian communities they were at once in a [fatal?; word not totally legible] position. Such questions as: Who are these men? What are they? had to be met by subterfuge. They were never previously connected with Natives or mission work. One minister said to me in consequence, the more they went among Christian people the more suspicious the people will be of them. . . . In conclusion, I do not desire to descend to the labyrinth of attacking personal and private characters, because I believe it is forbidden by the laws of decency as well as those of libel. . . . Last, but not least, we have been kindly received by the British public, and to some we are exceedingly grateful for many and various tokens of kindness. It has been a remarkable thing to me that one has to go to England in order to realize the warm heartedness, the spontaneous and unwearing generosity, and hospitality and the stirring kindness of the British people” (“Affairs of the African Choir”, Imvo Zabantsundu, March 17, 1892). Several features need to be noted concerning this remarkable document. First, as a New African in developing South African modernity, Paul Xiniwe believed that his education, intellect, talents, political commitments, made him the equal of any educated white person. Secondly, the making of artistic products or artistic productivity in modernity had both a financial and aesthetic components which should not be confused with each other for sentimental or political reasons. Thirdly, he came to discover that the category European, in this instance meaning white, was politically abstract, and needed to be situated within particular national situations, in order to understand and comprehend its full complexity. It was because of his first rate intellect that Z. K. Matthews and T. D. Mweli Skota, among many other members of the African intelligentsia, held Paul Xiniwe in such great esteem.  It is not surprising therefore that in Mweli Skota’s great book, The African Yearly Register, a book that attempted to capture the collective historical experience of New African consciousness in modernity, the photograph of Paul Xiniwe is probably the most prominent. A biographical sketch of Paul Xiniwe on the opposite page to the photograph, in all probability written by Mweli Skota himself, since he too was engaged and fascinated by the business nature or economic rationality of modernity, celebrates the idea that the New African should deeply engage herself with the economic principles or the economics of modernity: “After some years he tired of the teaching profession, and having saved some money, resigned in order to become a business man. He brought property at East London, Port Elizabeth and Kingwiliamstown, and opened stores as merchant and hotel proprietor. At Kingwilliamstown his property was conspicuous, being a double storey building and known as the Temperance Hotel. In a very short time the Temperance Hotel was known through the Cape Province. Paul Xiniwe took a very keen interest in the welfare of his people. An upright man, honest gentleman, and a thorough Christian and a staunch temperance apostle” (“Mr. Paul Xiniwe”, The African Yearly Register, compiled and edited by T. D. Mweli Skota, R. L. Lesson and Company Limited, 1930, p.109). Both portraits of Paul Xiniwe in Mweli Skota’s collective portrait and in Matthews geneological sketch, the New African economic person is emphasized. It is clear therefore that Z. K. Matthews in 1961 must have written the panoramic sketch of New African intelligentsia  with T. D. Mweli Skota’s incomparable book of 1930 open in front of him. What both emphasize, nevertheless, is that we need to know more about the New African economic person, rather than only the political or the artistic one. Perhaps with the momentous change of 1994, this person will occupy a more central position in the foreground of our rewritten national histories.