In an obituary of Alfred B. Xuma, Z. K. Matthews wrote the following: "Dr. A. B. Xuma came originally from the district of Engcobo in the Transkei. . . . There [in United States] he attended such well known educational institutions as Tuskegee, Booker Washington's famous College, the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University in the state of Illinois where he qualified as a doctor. . . . Under his leadership the A. N. C. went from strength to strength. It was during his term of office that the A. N. C. Youth League was founded, the A. N. C. Women's League was revived and re-vitalised. . . . As a leader of his people Dr. Xuma was a man of high ideals and and unimpeachable integrity. He believed in equal citizenship rights for all in South Africa. Although he was not the type of leader who breathed fire and brimstone to make his point, he was always steadfast in his advocacy of the claims of his people" ("Tribute To Late Dr. A. B. Xuma", Imvo Zabantsundu, February 10, 1962). This brilliant summarization indicates several pathways towards historically reconstructing the moment of Xuma in South African intellectual and political history. Of all the New African Intellectuals within the New African Movement, with the possible exception of R. V. Selope Thema, Xuma actualized in his becoming a New African, the practical struggles and practices in his attaining an education as philosophized by Booker T. Washington in Up From Slavery. In becoming a medical doctor, in conditions of extreme adversities in United States, Xuma 'exemplified' the pedagogics of Washington as a lived experience. Steven D. Gish's doctoral dissertation, Alfred B. Xuma, 1893-1962: African, American, South African (Stanford University, 1994) clearly shows this to have been the case. This explains why Dr. Xuma was so taken with Charlotte Manye Maxeke, who to him represented a modern woman as a New African Woman who wills  herself into history. This is the reason of his monograph on her: Charlotte Manye (Maxeke) or What An Educated African Girl Can Do (1930). The preface to the monograph was written by the great W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been Maxeke's teacher at Wilberforce University between 1896 and 1898. What really impressed Xuma about Maxeke is not only in having brought the historical consciousness of modernity to the African women in South Africa, but in also having had a wherewithal in founding the Wilberforce Institute (High School) in Johannesburg with the help of the AME Church upon her return from United States. What also impressed Xuma, as Z. K. Matthews alludes, is her having founded the ANC Women's League. In fact Charlotte Manye Maxeke may have been possibly present at the founding of the ANC in 1912 in Bloemfontein. The second importance of Xuma, mentioned in Z. K. Matthews' homage, is that he modernized the ANC while it was under his command as president-general from 1940 to 1949. He payed the organization's debts from his personal finances and streamlined its organizational structure. Having stramlined the central command, he revived the regional sections of the organization. He also initiated the alliances with Indians and Coloureds, despite the vociferous hostility of the ANC Youth League (witness the denouncing editorials written by Jordan K. Ngubane in Inkundla ya Bantu). This alliance was to prove fundamental and prescient in the formation of the Congress of Alliance in the 1955, six years after being deposed as leader of the ANC, a deposing lead by the ANC Youth League. These complex and complicated achievements of Alfred B. Xuma explain the ambivalent attitudes and feelings towards him expressed in Nelson Mandela's recent autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom (1994). Mandela was one of the principal instigators of the events of 1949. Xuma's monumental project of modernizing the ANC was in complete tune with his consciousness of himself as a New African. This New Africanism in the 1950s, intermingled with Xuma's Americanism, is what mesmerized some of the younger generation of Sophiatown Renaissance writers such as Bloke Modisane. Modisane in his autobiography, Blame Me On History, portrays Xuma's Sophiatown residence as the epitomization of modernity itself: "The house of Dr Xuma had always been the model for my landed security. There was a tiny plot in Gold Street next to Diggers Hall, opposite the house of Mr Dondolo and the shebeen, 'The Battleship', which I had hoped to purchase after becoming a doctor and on which I would construct my palace; but that dream has been annihilated, it is languishing among the ruins like black South African dreams, yet behind me stood the house of Dr Xuma, bold and majestic, like the man inside it, the Ma-Willie [Modisane's mother] wanted me to emulate" ([1963] 1986, p. 33). Beside epitomizing the modern man, Alfred B. Xuma represented a certain political practice in modernity. Before being elected to the presidency of the ANC, five years earlier in 1935, Xuma had worked with R. V. Selope Thema, Z. R. Mahabane, D. D. T. Jabavu and others in founding the All African Convention (AAC), as a response to the Hertzog Bills which were intended to restrict and eliminate African franchise. Although Xuma never really understood the social forces behind the political modernity of the ANC Youth League, he wrote some of the fundamental South African political treatises of the 1930s and 1940s: Reconstituting the Union of South Africa Or A More Rational Union Policy (1932), Africans' Claims in South Africa (1945). As the ultimate tribute to the political vision of Alfred B. Xuma, however conservative it was in certain instances, without his modernizing the organizational structures of the ANC in the 1940s, the victory of the ANC and the African people in 1994 would not have been as succesful as it has been. In this sense, there is a deeper line of continuity between Alfred B. Xuma and Nelson Mandela, than is apparent.