Black Republican Tradition, Nativism and Populist Politics in South Africa‪.‬

Introduction The South Asian historian Sumit Sarkar (1992:3) once stated that 'unimportant events of no obvious consequence which stick out and refuse to fit into any of the established patterns of historical reconstruction' are valuable insofar as they 'afford oblique entry points into social history and can throw light upon dimensions obscured by dominant--all too often teleological--analytical frameworks'. This is true of the Native Club, the emergence of which in 2006 spawned a flurry of intellectual and political activity and acrimonious debate circulating in both print and electronic media.