The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s

Michael Chapman, ed. The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s. Introduction by John Matshikiza. Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 2001. 241 pp. $54 cloth. Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner, eds. Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 375 pp. $103 cloth. The negritude movement had Presence Africaine; the Harlem Renaissance had Crisis and Opportunity; South African writers of the 1950s had Drum magazine. Paul Gready has written that Drum's "flashy muck-raking journalistic style attempted to capture the vivid life of the townships. Drum became a symbol of a new urban South Africa" (146); for Rob Nixon, it "amplified the voices of a defiantly impure cosmopolitanism, projecting an urban look and ethos" (28). Lewis Nkosi, who went to work for the magazine in 1957, said that Drum "wasn't so much a magazine as it was a symbol of the new African cut adrift from the tribal reserve--urbanised, eager, fast-talking and brash" (Home and Exile 8). The magazine serialized novels by Alan Paton and Peter Abrahams, and occasionally published the work of black American writers like Langston Hughes. Perhaps the most important function Drum played, though, was to serve as a launching pad for the careers of a whole generation of young black and mixed-race fiction writers and journalists: Bloke Modisane, Can Themba, James Matthews, Peter Clarke, Arthur Maimane, and Richard Rive, among others, published their earliest work in the pages of Drum, and Ezekiel Mphahlele reached a wider audience through the magazine's readership. Michael Chapman pays tribute to this remarkable legacy in his invaluable little collection The Drum Decade. This is actually the second edition of a book first published in 1989, with a new introduction by John Matshikiza, son of Todd Matshikiza, one of the earliest writers for the magazine. The Drum Decade includes stories by all of the above-mentioned authors, as well as pieces by other well-known writers like Alex La Guma, Henry Nxumalo, Nat Nakasa, and Casey Motsisi. Some of the stories are readily available elsewhere--those by Rive, Mphahlele, and Modisane, for instance--but it is illuminating to see them in their original form and in the context of other Drum stories. Chapman gives us Modisane's "The Dignity of Begging" as it originally appeared, with an ending that "shifts from the ironic tale of the beggar-survivor to an ambiguous celebration of rural homecoming" (17), rather than in the revised version that appeared in the anthology Darkness and Light in 1958. Thus, even the inclusion of the more familiar stories contributes to the historical value of this collection. But the book's real interest, for this reviewer, lies in its selection of writers who are scarcely remembered today. One such writer is Dyke H. Sentso whose story "Under the Blue-Gum Trees" won the first Drum short story competition in 1953. Sentso published a handful of stories in Drum between 1951 and 1954, but then virtually disappeared; "Blue-Gum Trees" shows what the world missed from his failure to realize his potential. Ostensibly a story about a paternalistic farmer and his relations with his farmhands, the story's subtext is the mechanization of rural life; it shows a society in the midst of radical transition and modernization. Indeed, South Africa's rapid transition into an industrialized urban country provides the backdrop for most of these stories. The first one, Alfred Mbeba's "Rhodesia Road" from 1951, depicts simple peasants from rural Nyasaland who travel to Salisbury in search of work, and are amazed and frightened at the life they find there. But the later stories (Chapman has arranged them in chronological order) reflect Drum's shift to an urban perspective; most of the characters are from the city, and see it through more jaded and worldly eyes. They may lament the loss of rural values and traditions--the characters in "Love Comes Deadly" by Mbokotwane Manqupu "cry for Shaka" (68) in the face of Johannesburg's violence; the narrator of Rive's "African Song" tells us that "the ways of the Great Cities are not good" (119); Nakasa describes the life of the boxer "King Kong" Dhlamini in "wild, stabbing, over-populated Johannesburg" (166). …