In the late 1800s in the eastern Cape Colony in present day South Africa new forms of political understanding, identity, organization, and action were emerging which would transform the vision and practice of politics across the African continent. This dissertation studies the earliest moments of emerging African nationalism in South Africa in order to understand the social transformations and relational dynamics which made this political innovation possible. It studies the relational conditions of political novelty across four levels of analysis, focusing on the rise of a class of ‘Intermediary Intelligentsia’ who were able to generate new political frameworks and repertoires by bridging between colonial and African political communities. By analyzing biographical and experiential transformation at the level of the individual, Chapter 1 shows how macro-social transformations invalidated old political frameworks, and how missionary-educated Africans were able to generate innovative new political answers and identities from their emergent intermediary social position. Chapter 2 follows how these intermediary figures were able to forge new connections between colonial and isiXhosa speaking political communities which enabled new avenues for impactful political practice. In order to bridge divided communities, I study how intermediary intelligentsia must develop multivocal political forms which resonate with their different audiences. This is exemplified through an examination of how the concept of isizwe or African nationhood was used by intermediary intelligentsia as they engaged colonial, missionary-educated, and rural-traditionalist audiences. Chapter 3 extends the focus on linkages by studying the inter-organizational connections formed by nascent African political organizations which emerged in the 1880s. The proto-nationalist political network is examined through network analysis techniques to show how the political structure shaped and enabled different forms of political innovation, and how cross-domain linkages enabled the consolidation of diverse local movements. Finally, Chapter 4 studies the transforming political vision of the larger discursive community through the 1880s through computational text analysis of the isiXhosa newspapers and qualitative coding of political organizations’ newspaper reports. This analysis tracks how the core identities and political emphasis of nascent African nationalism emerged over time in the isiXhosa newspapers. Taken together, this dissertation contributes a sociological analysis of this important period of political transformation and theorizes the social and relational conditions which facilitate political transformation and innovation more broadly.