Drum Magazine Research Articles

Gender-Based Violence, the Sophiatown Shebeens, and Presentism in Can Themba’s Stories Beyond ‘The Suit’

The last decade or so has seen a renewed interest in Can Themba, writer on Drum magazine of the 1950s. Interest has centred on the story, ‘The Suit’: a story that taps what is a current scourge in South Africa, gender-based violence. While referring to adaptations of ‘The Suit’ by other writers, the article seeks to recover Themba as the writer of more than a single story. This involves returning his work to the time of its initial inspiration at a time of apartheid repression and Sophiatown shebeen defiance. The purpose is not to anchor Themba in his past, however, but to release his stories to speak to us today from within the contours of their originating energy.

So-Fire-Town: The representations of a translucent urban Black femininity in the Black press through the signatures of Dolly Rathebe in the 1950s

abstract This focus reads the multiple selves of Dolly Rathebe as represented in popular cultural discourse, particularly in Drum magazine during the 1950s. Black translucent femininity is a conceptual tool, I argue, with opacity and obscurity; afforded is the opportunity to engage Dolly Rathebe and her various representations with complexity, elasticity and multiplicity. This conception of translucent Black femininities allows room for reckoning with selves that would ordinarily not be considered complex and contradictory. I analyse the representations of Rathebe as situated within the popular cultural discourse structured by a white capitalist and heteropatriarchal prism contoured by Black masculinity. I explore pseudonymity as a tool of (re)creating a self and the layered selves of Dolly Rathebe. The self-fashioning of Rathebe displayed in various representations opens the possibility of depicting layered selves, and I intend to show the elasticity of the figure of Rathebe by reading these representations alongside each other. In this way I illustrate the layered and multiple selves that stretch from the primary self of Rathebe – particularly the self-fashioning of the figure of the romantic advice column ‘Dear Dolly’ which appeared in Drum. It is also in the navigation of the various traces of the name Dolly, derivative of the name Dorothy, that I expand on the multiplicity and translucence of urban Black femininity represented by Dolly Rathebe. This informs expansion from singular and flat stereotypical representations to multiple and translucent representations, thus illustrating the elasticity of urban Black femininity as depicted in popular cultural discourse.

“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in Zonk!

“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in <i>Zonk!</i>

Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and &lt;i&gt;The Bantu World&lt;/i&gt;

Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentiethcentury South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s ‘Drum generation’. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, An African Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, “R. Roamer Esq.” which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu World over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant’s room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer’s verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience, interpolation and movement of the black body in segregationist-era urban space, offering a striking early reading of the racial city as both a place of constraint and a zone of inventive resistance. The article makes a further claim for the importance of African print cultures as an index of urbanity, of African newspapers as significant but overlooked sites of city inscription and black urban life in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.Keywords: R. R. R. Dhlomo, The Bantu World, city literature, satire, African print cultures, African literature, South African literature, spatiality

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACTThis article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.

Imagining and appreciating “the long eye of history”: race, form and representation in Drum magazine’s serialisation of wild conquest

ABSTRACTNewspapers and magazines in South Africa are acknowledged as having played a significant role in the fostering of literary journalism and criticism amongst black writers. Drum is commended for inaugurating the flourishing of the short-story genre. The launch of Drum in 1951 was preceded by the departure of Abrahams from South Africa to England in September 1939. Yet Drum and Abrahams – through his novel Wild Conquest, travelogue and autobiography Return to Goli and Tell Freedom – initiated an important conversation on the limits and possibilities of the synergies between the different platforms and genres in print culture and the extent to which they can capture and navigate the divergent aesthetic and socio-political imperatives that informed the magazine, writers and readers. This paper is an examination of Drum’s promotion of reading and writing amongst black South Africans from 1951–1960 as reflected in its intermittent forays in the serialisation of novels. It uses the magazine’s interpellation of Peter Abrahams and his work during 1951–1960 as a case-study into the intricate web and tensions of context, form and theme as well as the genealogies of writing and hermeneutics in black South African literature.

Writing against innocence: Entangled temporality, black subjectivity, and Drum writers revisited

This article examines the representation of time in narratives of childhood experience in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963). These two autobiographies are among the most widely-known works by the group of South African writers who have been loosely associated with Drum magazine in the 1950s. Originating from the early years of the anti-apartheid struggle and resonating widely with the heightened anticolonial resistance movements across the continent, writings by the so-called Drum writers, many of whom later went into exile, have often been viewed and criticized as “protest literature”, as literary works whose aesthetic merits are somehow compromised by the overt political purposes they appear to serve. This article seeks to revise such a reading by revisiting the politics of the stylistic innovations in these autobiographical narratives. Themes and motifs directly derived from the rhetoric of political protest, as I argue, in fact problematize a developmental logic governing the biographical transition from childhood to adulthood and contribute to a radical critique of linear temporality and teleological historiography. While writing from polemical positions and from inside the historical juncture of political resistance, these writers’ narrative reflections on and re-orderings of the relationship between the past and the present also partake of the process of refashioning modern black subjectivity, a significant move of literary intervention that still has profound resonance in our postcolonial, post-apartheid, and post-revolutionary present.

&lt;em&gt;The Tailored Suit&lt;/em&gt;: Re-Membering and Gendering Can Themba's “The Suit”

This paper examines the short film The Tailored Suit (2011), written and directed by Kitso Lelliott, in order to consider 1950s Sophiatown’s sociocultural legacy pertaining to race and gender in South Africa. The film is inspired by the work of Can Themba, a writer and journalist who worked at Drum magazine in the 1950s. Though the establishment of a cosmopolitan black identity was significant in its undermining of Nationalist Party segregationist ideology, the struggle for equality was predicated on a racial struggle that subsumed a gendered agenda. Here the work of Can Themba and Drum magazine, which have become mythologized in contemporary South Africa, are interrogated with particular emphasis on Themba’s iconic short story, “The Suit” (1963). Through engagement with Themba’s text, I foreground the processes through which black women have been subjected to multiple, compounded subjugation. In response to the representations of black femininity in the short story “The Suit,” the film The Tailored Suit privileges black women’s articulations, foregrounding the agency of marginalized subjects. From the periphery, subjugated women can destabilize the hierarchical social structures that subordinate and objectify her. By troubling representations of black woman in “The Suit,” part of an iconic historic moment prefiguring the contemporary sociocultural milieu, the reimagining in the short film offers a fragmented frame of reference, positing an alternate to a homogenizing masculine discourse on history. In The Tailored Suit history and memory are stitched into the fabric of the present, at times indistinguishable as they bleed into one another and the “dismembered and unaccounted for” memories of the marginalized begin to appear.

The “Afro Look” and Global Black Consciousness

This essay examines the rise in popularity of “Afro look” fashions in the 1970s. The name Afro look was given by fashion industry insiders on both sides of the Atlantic to describe clothing that featured African and African-inspired prints, textiles, and embroidery techniques. Usually these prints were applied to popular silhouettes such as the miniskirt, bellbottoms, hot pants, and maxidresses. The growing popularity of Afro-look designs stirred a flurry of debate within the fashion world about the origins of these popular designs. I argue that origins mattered. Laying claim to a fashion innovation allowed a nation or region of the world to position itself as the model of modernity and cultural sophistication. Many newly independent African nations were eager to reposition themselves on the world stage, and fashion became one way to do so. In apartheid-era South Africa, such politics were particularly important as black South Africans fought for basic human rights. Drum magazine—South Africa’s leading fashion black lifestyle magazine—chronicled the burgeoning Black Consciousness movement along side its coverage of black fashion models and fashion designers. Fashion was political. One’s attire was an important extension of one’s personal and collective politics. Using Drum as a primary source, I demonstrate that many within the continent’s fashion industry were invested in telling an African-centered fashion history. They used fashion to make claims of modernity, attempting to depict the realities of African life and culture, which looked far different from the images of bare-breasted women and men in loincloths that filled the pages of National Geographic. Afro-look fashions, and the models and other socialites who sported them, became a symbol for African opulence, style, and glamour in a time of immense social and political upheaval.

“Too late for tears, dear sister”: Constructing victims and perpetrators of rape in the advice column 'Dear Dolly' from 1984 to 2004.

This article reports on the ways in which the rape of women by men is constructed in the advice column Dear Dolly , published in the South African periodical Drum Magazine . The data collected for the study spans from 1984 to 2004, encompassing both 10 years before and 10 years after the onset of democracy in South Africa. The article uses critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003) as main analytical tool, but also draws on critical feminist theory (Bourke 2007). The findings suggest that there has been a decrease in explicit victim blaming after 1994, but that subtle and opaque victim blaming is still evident in readers’ letters and in the responses. These rape discourses presented in Drum after 1994 are, as Bakhtin (1981) suggests, made up of multiple voices articulating different gendered discourses. In this article, we argue that even though the use of less explicit victim blaming might seem like a positive move in the representation of rape and gender, this is not always the case. The more subtle forms of victim blaming avoid contestation and consequently often go unchecked (Fairclough 2003: 58). Additionally, new rape myths are created to mitigate the responsibility of males. These processes of subtle victim blaming and new myth-making manufacture consent and make it more difficult to counteract dominant discourses.

An Investigation of the Cultural Characteristics Associated with Female Message Sources in South African Print Advertisements in Drum Magazine

The paper investigates the cultural characteristics associated with female massage sources in print advertisements using Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). The paper is based on a quantitative analysis of a sample of 244 print advertisements drawn from the South African general interest magazine Drum. The content analysis was performed by independent coders and resulted in high levels of intercoder reliability. The results show that the top two values emphasised in the advertisements are achievement and power in the self-enhancement value domain. These results are not consistent with previous studies and appear to be at variance with the ubuntu-inspired values one would expect to find amongst the target readers of the magazine. The paper concludes that use of messages that conflict with consumers’ value systems could be a call for more research to understand the target audience better.The limitations of the study and opportunities for further research are identified. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p36

Portrayals of men and women in Drum magazine (South Africa) advertisements

Orientation: The subject of gender portrayals in advertising continues to generate academicdiscussions in part because of its socialisation effects.Research purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine how print advertisements inDrum magazine portray women and men based on a number of categories including traitdescriptors, physical characteristics, role behaviours and occupational status.Motivation for the study: It is important to understand gender portrayals in advertisingbecause perceptions of social reality are influenced by what people are exposed to insocialisation agents such as advertisements.Research approach, design and method: A quantitative content analysis was run on a sampleof 415 advertisements drawn from Drum magazine. Partial least squares analysis was used toassess the relationships between the variables.Main findings: The findings show that gender has a statistically significant effect on profiles(roles) and sexual appeal but not on gender equity. Advertisers therefore treat modelsdifferently with regard to the roles assigned and the use of sexual appeal.Practical/managerial implications: Previous research evidence and theory indicate that thecontent of advertisements does influence readers’ self-perception and also their perceptionof others. Within the bounds of advertising creativity, it is important that advertisers payparticular attention to gender portrayals in advertising to avoid the creation or perpetuationof gender stereotypes.Contribution/value-add: Though the model’s gender influences portrayals in advertising,other contextual factors are also important determinants of portrayals.

Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude

Research Article| December 01 2014 Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude Shane Graham Shane Graham Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (4): 481–512. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Graham; Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2014; 60 (4): 481–512. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Whose Shakespeare? Early Black South African Engagement with Shakespeare

In the twentieth century Shakespeare came to impinge in a significant way on the lives and thought of a small but increasing number of black South Africans. From the beginning, as Laurence Wright has observed, Shakespeare was regarded in overwhelmingly positive terms by the few black people who came into contact with his plays. Shakespeare represented an aspect - and arguably a rather important aspect - of a literary and political culture to which they felt entitled but which, for long periods, their rulers would rather deny them. In the famous apartheid-era Drum magazine of the 1950s, though, both black and white journalists drew upon Shakespeare to enrich their understanding and descriptions of township cultures, aware of the parallels between Shakespeare's Elizabethan world and what they now saw around them. On Robben Island in the 1980s a collected works of Shakespeare, disguised as the Koran, circulated amongst the political prisoners who chose, and marked, their favourite quotations. Shakespeare, it seems, could speak very directly and positively to the experience of black South Africans.

The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (review)

Reviewed by: The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences Shane Graham Peter McDonald . The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. xvi + 416 pp. Censorship has, of course, been much discussed in South African literary studies. But Peter McDonald's The Literature Police is a groundbreaking book in two ways: first, it is to my knowledge the first book to attempt a comprehensive historical overview of censorship in apartheid South Africa and its effects, not just on writers, but on publishers, literary journals, writers' organizations, and other key institutions. Second, it is the first text to look closely and methodically at the paper trail left behind by the Board of Censors to analyze precisely which texts were banned and the reasons given. The Literature Police is densely packed with important and original findings, and will surely be a study that scholars of South African literature will have to acquaint themselves with for years to come. The struggle between the writer and the censor is as old as writing itself; in the particular case of the censorship of literary works in South Africa, McDonald traces it to the "arrival" of literature itself, which his opening declaration sets at 1824—the year that Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn launched the South African Journal, only to see it quickly suppressed by Governor Somerset: "Having arrived in March 1824, in other words, literature with all the significance Pringle and Fairbairn attached to it had by September effectively been closed down at the behest of the colonial state" (9). McDonald's point is that struggles over the definition and publication of literature began under British colonialism, which shaped later forms of state censorship under apartheid. McDonald begins chapter 1 by discussing the Publications Commission headed by Geoffrey Cronjé from 1954 to 1957. Many of the commission's draconian recommendations were implemented in the Publications and Entertainments Act of 1963, which created a new Board of Censors. For McDonald, a crucial development in this reconstitution of the board was that respected Afrikaans literary critic Gerrit Dekker was appointed to be its first chair. Under Dekker's leadership, the new board came to define its role not only as guardians of apartheid and of a Christian moral order, but also as guardians of the literary, and specifically of what McDonald calls the "volk avant-garde" (28). McDonald argues the most significant consequence of this concession to literary considerations "was that it put the question of literature—what is it and who decides?—at the centre of apartheid censorship" (39). [End Page 389] The censors' self-appointed role as guardians of the literary did little to mitigate the repression engendered by vigorous state censorship. Instead, it introduced an element of perversity into the proceedings, resulting in rulings that were all the more capricious, unpredictable, and indefensible for being based on supposedly literary criteria. McDonald summarizes the situation of literary authors working under the threat of censorship: "versions of their own anxieties, which centered on the inextricably tangled questions of literature, censorship, and the ethics of writing, were built into the system itself, as a consequence of the government's initial compromises with the volk avant-garde" (165). Literary publishers as well were "entangled in an absurdly high-minded, asymmetrical, and potentially devastating rivalry with the censors over the idea of literature itself, which brought with it real risks of financial loss, imprisonment, or both" (85). Because the censors' powers were so sweeping, and because so many texts were sent to them for review, The Literature Police by necessity becomes a history of South African literary production in the twentieth century. African-language publishing was so thoroughly co-opted in the service of Bantu Education that McDonald is able to dispense with that strand of the history fairly quickly. But his accounts of both Afrikaans and English literature in South Africa are expansive and deeply informed. Much of this is well-worn territory, but reading this history through the lens of censorship proves highly revealing. It sheds new light, for example, on such familiar narratives as the rise and decline of Drum magazine in the 1950s, and Nadine Gordimer's disagreement with...

Grace and The Townships Housewife: Excavating black South African women's magazines from the 1960s1

abstract Grace and The Townships Housewife, two black women's magazines published in South Africa between 1964 and 1969, have slipped into obscurity. In what follows, I reassess their role in the history of the black popular press in South Africa. Grace and The Townships Housewife appear to be the first women's magazines in South Africa aimed specifically at black women, preceding other more familiar titles such as True Love (1974), Pace (1978) and Thandi (1985). Besides a brief reference to these two magazines in Switzer and Switzer's The Black Press In South Africa And Lesotho (1997:157–158), no research has ever been done on Grace and The Townships Housewife. The first section provides general information (staff, content, target audience) on the magazines. The second part foregrounds the colliding voices that infuse the magazines’ content: at times the magazines promote modernity (which they often equate with ‘white’, ‘western’ lifestyles); at other times they critique modernity as destructive of cherished African traditions. The final section involves a brief comparison between the representation of black women in Grace and The Townships Housewife and the representation of black women in Drum magazine (1950s) and in Die Huisgenoot, Sarie Marais and Fair Lady (1960s). Critical to this discussion will be the sense of self-authorship presented in Grace and The Townships Housewife.

‘The Girl About Town’: discussions of modernity and female youth in Drum magazine, 1951–1970

This article examines the trope of the ‘modern miss’ in Drum magazine 1951–1970 as a locus for debate over South African urban modernity. At the centre of Drum’s African urbanity was a debate between a progressive, positively ‘modern’ existence and an attendant fear of moral and social ‘breakdown’ in the apartheid city. The trope of the ‘modern miss’ drew upon both discourses. Drum’s fascination with the ‘modern miss’ reached a peak in the years 1957–1963, during which time she appeared prominently in the magazine as a symbolic pioneer of changing gender and generational relationships. However, this portrayal continued to coexist alongside the image of young women as the victims of moral degeneration. The ‘modern miss’ was increasingly differentiated from adult women within Drum’s pages, which distanced her from the new space won by political activists. By examining constructions of young womanhood, this article points to the gendering of ‘youth’ at the intersection of commercial print culture and shifting social relations in mid‐twentieth‐century South Africa. It is also suggested that understanding the social configurations of Drum’s modernity illuminates the gendered and generational responses of formal political movements as they conducted their own concurrent debates.

The urban palimpsest: Re‐presenting Sophiatown

Evoking the notion of urban topography as palimpsest, this article treats urban space as the parchment on which constructions of urban modernity – always already gendered – are inscribed and reinscribed. Focusing on Sophiatown, one of the most symbolically charged and contested urban spaces, and certainly the most iconic urban fiction, it engages with historical processes of erasure in order to explore representations of Sophiatown as an overwritten document whose past topographies linger as traces resistant to effacement, and which, instead, underpin or haunt the imprint of superimposing layers. Taking as my starting point Dorothy Driver’s exploration of the operations of “woman as ‘sign’” in Drum magazine, I extend her reading across various layers of the urban palimpsest as I trace the sedimentation of gender performances in the production of urban modernity, from Alan Paton and the “fabulous fifties” to post‐apartheid returns to and of Sophiatown in Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1994) and the films Drum (2004) and Sophiatown: Surviving Apartheid (2003).

Masculinity, Matrimony and Generation: Reconfiguring Patriarchy in Drum 1951–1983*

In this article, I discuss some of the ways in which Drum tended to ascribe ‘modernity’ to particular practices and processes in opposition to other practices and processes portrayed as ‘traditional’. In mid-twentieth-century South Africa, dominant discourses tended to signal (white) male adulthood through independent decision making alongside financial autonomy. In contrast African discourses tended to signal male adulthood through proximity to family members, through respect for age and seniority and through deference to the praxis of ‘tradition’. In the representations of black men in its pages, Drum magazine negotiated a somewhat disorderly path through these competing racialised discourses. I suggest that Drum's claim that black males were indeed men, was made through highlighting and condoning practices that demonstrated similarities and continuities between subordinate black and dominant white versions of manhood. In challenging the racial discourse the magazine paradoxically found itself simultaneously reinforcing western rather than African versions of manhood.

Whitewashing Drum Magazine (1951–1959): Advertising Race and Gender

Whitewashing Drum Magazine (1951–1959): Advertising Race and Gender