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Review, |
Who Killed Mr. Drum? by Sylvester Stein. Reviewed by Sean Merrigan Like many white critics of the apartheid era, Sylvester Stein remains ambivalent about his own role in the fight for democracy in South Africa. "It was easiest of all for white-man me," he says of his "newspaperman's calling." In Who Killed Mr. Drum? he is always self-deprecating in regard of his own achievements as editor of the legendary Drum magazine, instead focussing on the heroic lives of the predominantly black staff. This is no doubt due, at least partly, to the complexity of being at once part of the privileged culture he vilifies for its crimes against black Africans, a sort angst that spills out into the prose of white South African authors such as Rian Malan and informs the photography of the late Kevin Carter. This, objective distance, however, can also partly be attributed to Stein's seemingly genetic news-sense, for he is before anything else, be it colour, class or background, a consummate reporter. He revels amongst the black, street-smart newshounds that were "shanghaied aboard" the paper, not the 'university toilers' who had laboured under less progressive incumbents, but "men living in the real rough world of Africa" who "talked Drum up into a noisy, opinionated journal." Drum magazine became one of the first periodicals in South Africa written by black Africans for black Africans. Started in the immediate post-war years, the magazine's starchy academism quickly metamorphosed into something far more popular and powerful. With investigative journalism into the colour bar by the likes of Henry "Mr. Drum" Nxumalo, witty social lampooning by Todd Matshikiza and Bloke Modisane, and fiction and poetry by Can Themba and E'skia Mphalele, Drum soon became a forum for urban black culture, a vibrant mix of shebeens (illegal drinking venues) and township football, tsotsis (gangsters) and skokiian (semi-lethal home-made liqueur). It also became a place where opposition to the white supremacist establishment could find a voice. Sadly, and by the same logic, it also became a target for repressive state retaliation. When Sylvester Stein answers the phone at five in the morning on New Year's Day, to be told that his chief reporter, Nxumalo, has been found on the township's outskirts, stabbed to death, he begins to suspect a politically and racially motivated plot. He enlists the Drum team to "attempt what the police refused to tackle" and instigate a public enquiry in the magazine's own columns. Who Killed Mr. Drum? is the question Stein's book attempts to answer. The 1950's saw something of a renaissance in African culture, of which Drum was certainly part. Sadly they were also to see some of South Africa's darkest years. In 1954 the Native Resettlement Act resulted in the bulldozing, and mass eviction of many urban black areas, and the formation of that uber-ghetto Soweto (SOuth WEstern TOwnships). A legacy from the Slum Act of 1933 (when Johannesburg was declared a "white town") these slum areas, often dilapidated and overpopulated, were nevertheless lively and creative, and often multiracial. Sophiatown, home of the Drum offices, boasted two thirds black ownership of property, and such alumni as Miriam Makeba (star of the stage show King Kong) and musician Hugh Masekela, as well as the majority of Drum's writer-reporters. The forced relocations at Sophiatown were denounced widely, the staunch anti-apartheid veteran Father Trevor Huddleston claimed that "South Africa had lost not only a place, but an ideal" but worse was to follow. The clearance of District Six, the banning of the ANC and the jailing of Nelson Mandela: all cast their shadow on the proceedings at the Drum offices, where slowly frustrations turn inward, and Bob Gosani, a press photographer, becomes next in a series of alcohol related deaths. By the early 1960's the brutal idiocy behind the Sharpeville massacres and the intransigence of the Verwoerd administration led Stein and those who could to abandon South Africa and Drum. Many were never to return. Who Killed Mr. Drum? contains much sadness. The deaths of so many gifted writers, often, as in the case of Bloke Modisane, too young and too far away from home, becomes proof that the search for the 'murderer' of Mr. Drum has been conducted on too narrow a focus - too caught up in the minutiae of township gossip and innuendo. Implicit throughout the book is the realisation that the real culprit, the 'Mr. Big', is not some gangster or outraged husband, or even alcohol, which the embittered Modisane refers to as "the African disease," but apartheid - with all its attendant brutality and frustration. In the hands of another breed of writer, Who Killed Mr. Drum? could potentially be little more than a morbid elegy for a once great literary phenomenon. However Stein's instinctive feel for reportage, fine copy and story keep the book buzzing with humour and insight. Whether he's celebrating the kwela stomp of a shebeen party, tasting at first hand the 'where’s your papers kaffir?' in his stint disguised as a 'native' or just relating the everyday camaraderie of the working press office - captured throughout the book in Jürgen Schadeberg's iconic photographs - Stein never fails to capture the 'cheeky' spirit of Drum, where more often than not the new voices of South Africa "just came jiving along the pavement, knocked at the door and barged in." |
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Diplomat, |
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York Evening Post, |
Murderous legacy of South Africa's hated regime by Ron Godfrey Who Killed Mr Drum?, by Sylvester Stein, (Corvo, £8.99) Manure of the smelliest kind grows roses of the sweetest musk - and the putrid mulch of sin that was apartheid in South Africa nurtured the most blessed of people. This is a true story about some of those saints - a gathering of legendary journalists at Drum Magazine in Johannesburg, which remained a beacon of happy-go-lucky defiance against the worst excesses of that bigoted, benighted white regime in the 1950s and 60s. It is a tragedy spiced with sassy humour as wild and rhythmic as a bongo-beat reflecting a time when kwela jazz powered the people into an ululating jutty-bummed dance of defiance against the tightening grip of a police state. These black cameramen and writers, hip, heroic and hilarious, were moulded by unbearable pressures into the most talented communicators in picture and word of that century. They deliberately and fearlessly got themselves arrested for "pass" offences - not carrying the papers that entitled them to be outside the township in case of random stops by the police - while trying to expose the hellish conditions in jails. They "invaded" whites-only Dutch Reformed Churches to pray and be sinned against for all the world to see. And they survived to write the stories or snap the telling pictures. Yet all were to die - either in loneliness, falling out of high police building windows, alcohol poisoning, unexplained illnesses or, as in the case of chief reporter Henry "Mr Drum" Nxumalo, in a blood-spattered heap in Soweto. A shorn-off button from a police tunic was later found on the ground nearby. The story, in which Nxumalo's end is a threaded ribbon of mystery, is told with pace and panache by their puckish white editor, Sylvester Stein, who reaches a conclusion too generalised and obvious to be satisfying but too brutally true to deny. Mr Drum, and his fellow journalists, were all victims of a lunatic Nazi dream of social engineering which has since, finally and thankfully, been vanquished. |
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Financial Times Magazine, |
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The Times |
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LauraHird.ComMoira McPartlin |
LauraHird.Com Review of Who Killed Mr. Drum? | |
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Updated 19th March 2009 |