THE NEW AFRICAN MOVEMENT AND ITS BEGINNINGS: FROM SOGA TO MQHAYI TO SEME

One fundamental issue encountered in the reconstruction of South African intellectual and cultural history in accordance with the newly emergent epistemic paradigm of the New African Movement is that of establishing a conceptual structure of its periodisation. With whom or with what governing idea should this periodising begin, and how should its end be determined? In his magisterial work Beginnings, Edward Said taught generations of postcolonial intellectuals and Third World scholars that the beginnings of intellectual processes are contentious force fields; similarly, in his brilliant book The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode has postulated the same observations regarding endings.

This was particularly true of the New African Movement, the foundation of which was made necessary by the making and construction of modernity in a context of political domination. Should its beginnings be identified with and demarcated through Pixley ka Isaka Seme who, in 1904, wrote a manifesto, ‘The Regeneration of Africa’, which unequivocally proclaimed that the beginning of the twentieth century would be the age of modernity in Africa – not only in South Africa – as well as the beginning of the decolonisation process from imperial and colonial domination?