1960-2010: “The Year of Africa” 50 Years On (IX)

THIS DAY IN 1960:

On July 1 1960 Ghana was declared a republic with Kwame Nkrumah as its president. Ghana's first independent administration was inaugurated on March 6 1957 with Kwame Nkrumah as prime minister.

THIS DAY IN 2010:


Ghana flag euphoria grips SA 2010

Writing from Johannesburg, sportscaster Yaw Ampofo-Ankrah takes an unusually spiritual look at the chances of Ghana's Black Stars against Uruguay in quarterfinals of 2010 Fifa World Cup Finals.

"In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it," Barack Obama quote from his February 10, 2007 Presidential announcement.

On numerous occasions, I have heard prominent Africans say that the only difference between Ghana and America is that America is a century ahead of Ghana. True or false? Harsh reality or exaggerated view? So does the flag of Ghana have mystical powers?


We may all have our own answers and interpretations to these frustrating questions but there is a powerful and mysterious phenomenon unfolding here at the 2010 World Cup Finals that has NEVER been witnessed before in the previous SIXTEEN editions.

It is the obsession to sign the red,gold and green flag of Ghana. It may appear all too simplistic and even romantic but WHY is President Jacob Zuma so keen to sign his best wishes on the Ghana flag along with his predecessor Thabo Mbeki? What about the former Kotoko (1968) and Black Stars (1969) and most recently coach of Bafana Bafana Carlos Alberto Parreira?

[Read More here and here]

Related Post:

On the 50th anniversary of Africa's 1st independent nation: Remembering Kwame Nkrumah

THIS DAY IN 1960:

On July 1 1960 Ghana was declared a republic with Kwame Nkrumah as its president. Ghana's first independent administration was inaugurated on March 6 1957 with Kwame Nkrumah as prime minister.

THIS DAY IN 2010:


Ghana flag euphoria grips SA 2010

Writing from Johannesburg, sportscaster Yaw Ampofo-Ankrah takes an unusually spiritual look at the chances of Ghana's Black Stars against Uruguay in quarterfinals of 2010 Fifa World Cup Finals.

"In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it," Barack Obama quote from his February 10, 2007 Presidential announcement.

On numerous occasions, I have heard prominent Africans say that the only difference between Ghana and America is that America is a century ahead of Ghana. True or false? Harsh reality or exaggerated view? So does the flag of Ghana have mystical powers?


We may all have our own answers and interpretations to these frustrating questions but there is a powerful and mysterious phenomenon unfolding here at the 2010 World Cup Finals that has NEVER been witnessed before in the previous SIXTEEN editions.

It is the obsession to sign the red,gold and green flag of Ghana. It may appear all too simplistic and even romantic but WHY is President Jacob Zuma so keen to sign his best wishes on the Ghana flag along with his predecessor Thabo Mbeki? What about the former Kotoko (1968) and Black Stars (1969) and most recently coach of Bafana Bafana Carlos Alberto Parreira?

[Read More here and here]

Related Post:

On the 50th anniversary of Africa's 1st independent nation: Remembering Kwame Nkrumah

On the 50th anniversary of Africa's 1st independent nation: Remembering Kwame Nkrumah [R]*

KWAME NKRUMAH (1909-1972)


Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Gold Coast's movement toward independence from Britain during the 1940s and '50s, headed the new nation of Ghana following its independence in 1957 until 1966, when he was overthrown by a coup.

Excerpt from "Commanding Heights" by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, 1998 ed., pp. 83-88. (Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y.)



-- In the period of [African colonial independence] the beacon country from Africa was Ghana, first to achieve independence in 1957. The new nation's most influential figure was its prime minister, later president, Kwame Nkrumah. When Nkrumah was born in 1910, Ghana was still the Gold Coast, a British colony known for its plantations and for being the world's largest producer of cocoa. Its frontiers were the result of bargains among the colonial powers - Britain, France, and Germany - that did not correspond to the historical boundaries of the kingdoms that preceded colonization, particularly the once-mighty Ashanti empire.

Nkrumah, who came from a modest, traditional family, received his early education at the hands of Catholic missionaries. He went on to train as a teacher and for a few years taught elementary school in towns along the coast. He was popular and charismatic, and earned a decent living. But exposure to politics and to a few influential figures sparked in him a greater interest - to go to America. He applied to universities in the United States, and with money raised from relatives, he set out on a steamer in 1935. He reached New York almost penniless, and took refuge with fellow West Africans in Harlem. He then presented himself at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and enrolled; a small scholarship and a campus job helped him make ends meet.

In the United States, Nkrumah saw alternatives to the British tradition of government. He also became suffused with an acute consciousness of the politics of race relations. Unlike many new African leaders, who sought to emulate their European instructors, Nkrumah plunged into America's black communities. Founded before the Civil War, Lincoln University was America's oldest black college, and its special atmosphere inspired and comforted Nkrumah. In the summers, he worked at physically demanding jobs - in shipyards and construction at sea. He studied theology as well as philosophy; he frequented the black churches in New York and Philadelphia and was sometimes asked to preach. He also forged ties with black American intellectuals, for whom Africa was becoming, in this time of political change, an area of extreme interest. Moving to London after World War II, Nkrumah helped organize Pan-African congresses, linking the emergent educated groups of the African colonies with activists, writers, artists, and well-wishers from the industrial countries. It was a time of great intellectual ferment, excitement, and optimism. India's achievement of independence in 1947 stirred dreams of freedom for the other colonies. "If we get self-government," Nkrumah proclaimed, "we'll transform the Gold Coast into a paradise in 10 years."

READ MORE HERE


*[First posted 17/03/07]

KWAME NKRUMAH (1909-1972)


Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Gold Coast's movement toward independence from Britain during the 1940s and '50s, headed the new nation of Ghana following its independence in 1957 until 1966, when he was overthrown by a coup.

Excerpt from "Commanding Heights" by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, 1998 ed., pp. 83-88. (Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y.)



-- In the period of [African colonial independence] the beacon country from Africa was Ghana, first to achieve independence in 1957. The new nation's most influential figure was its prime minister, later president, Kwame Nkrumah. When Nkrumah was born in 1910, Ghana was still the Gold Coast, a British colony known for its plantations and for being the world's largest producer of cocoa. Its frontiers were the result of bargains among the colonial powers - Britain, France, and Germany - that did not correspond to the historical boundaries of the kingdoms that preceded colonization, particularly the once-mighty Ashanti empire.

Nkrumah, who came from a modest, traditional family, received his early education at the hands of Catholic missionaries. He went on to train as a teacher and for a few years taught elementary school in towns along the coast. He was popular and charismatic, and earned a decent living. But exposure to politics and to a few influential figures sparked in him a greater interest - to go to America. He applied to universities in the United States, and with money raised from relatives, he set out on a steamer in 1935. He reached New York almost penniless, and took refuge with fellow West Africans in Harlem. He then presented himself at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and enrolled; a small scholarship and a campus job helped him make ends meet.

In the United States, Nkrumah saw alternatives to the British tradition of government. He also became suffused with an acute consciousness of the politics of race relations. Unlike many new African leaders, who sought to emulate their European instructors, Nkrumah plunged into America's black communities. Founded before the Civil War, Lincoln University was America's oldest black college, and its special atmosphere inspired and comforted Nkrumah. In the summers, he worked at physically demanding jobs - in shipyards and construction at sea. He studied theology as well as philosophy; he frequented the black churches in New York and Philadelphia and was sometimes asked to preach. He also forged ties with black American intellectuals, for whom Africa was becoming, in this time of political change, an area of extreme interest. Moving to London after World War II, Nkrumah helped organize Pan-African congresses, linking the emergent educated groups of the African colonies with activists, writers, artists, and well-wishers from the industrial countries. It was a time of great intellectual ferment, excitement, and optimism. India's achievement of independence in 1947 stirred dreams of freedom for the other colonies. "If we get self-government," Nkrumah proclaimed, "we'll transform the Gold Coast into a paradise in 10 years."

READ MORE HERE


*[First posted 17/03/07]

UNDER THE DRUM BEAT

I am not exactly someone to judge a book by its cover but I must admit to being sometimes inclined to buy a magazine just for its cover…
Now, here’s a magazine I would certainly buy just for its covers: the Drum magazine of ‘50s and ‘60s South Africa. I might have bought one or two of its more recent editions for their content, but those early ones would have got my money just for the covers. Of course, they are now collector’s items and highly protected by the Black African History Archives (BAHA) and The Bailey Archive, so I doubt that a common mortal like me would have a chance to get hold of one these days. But I can, nonetheless, claim possession of one of those highly coveted t-shirts printed with Drum covers put on the SA market by the very talented, clever and praised Nkhensani Nkhosi, actress and founder/creative director of fashion house Stoned Cherrie and one of the symbols of the New South Africa.

I mean, who, among those of us grown up in Southern Africa knowing of and experiencing, even if only indirectly, the antics of the apartheid system, would have imagined that within that system there was ever a place for a magazine telling through its covers of such a glamourous and exciting Black South Africa? And beyond that, of a Black Africa – there were, in fact, a South African and a West African (based in Ghana) versions of Drum, the latter telling us such amazing stories as Louis Armstrong’s visit to his motherland in February 1961 – precisely when armed struggle against colonial rule in Angola had started?

From a historical perspective, I would venture that that Drum of the ‘50s and early ‘60s could only be a testimony of the resistance of a social makeup the apartheid system (instituted in 1948) hadn’t yet managed to completely suppress, which makes those numbers even more valuable. That is precisely what those fortunate enough to have looked inside its covers will tell you: Drum was a repository of all the gripping stories chronicling the early years of the apartheid regime – except, apparently, for the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, which its legendary owner, Jim Bailey, reportedly didn’t allow to have mentioned in the magazine…

About Bailey, Bongani Madondo and Don Morrison wrote in an investigative story on Drum, What Made Drum Beat?, for the, now defunct, British “Zembla Literary Magazine”, in 2004: (…) After all, nobody knew about sensationalism better than Jim Bailey, a man whose name inspires perjoratives from former friends and victims. Ruthless. Dreamer. Freak. Wannabe Black. Bohemian. Drinker. Rich liberal son of colonialists (and quasi-colonialist himself). But also Visionary. Scholar. God’s gift to African publishing. Bailey’s father, Sir Abe Bailey, was a well-known South African mining magnate, financier and friend of arch-colonialist Cecil John Rhodes. Jim’s mother,Lady Mary Bailey, was an aviatrix whose 1927 solo flight from Croydon to Cape Town is legendary. After graduation from Oxford, young James Richard Abe Bailey joined the World War II British army and became a fighter pilot. Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1940s, he headed to Cape Town, then – as now- a magnet for bored Europeans in search of sun and excitement.

There Bailey met Robert Crisp, sole proprietor of a dull magazine called ‘The African Drum’, previously ‘The Bongo Drum’, which covered the quantly colorful lives of rural blacks who feared God and endured the missionary. Bailey saw an opportunity. All over the world, black people were becoming style-makers and urban culture creators. In New York and Paris, blacks were arbiters of fashion for both the counterculture and the mainstream. The Beat Generation imbibed jazz and the blues, smoked and wrote out of an existentialism espoused by blacks.Poetry, music, fashion – aaah, to be black, Bailey thought. He purchased the publication in 1951 and moved it to Johannesburg, where he imported from England an energetic editor named Anthony Sampson (who later found fame with his ‘Anatomy of Britain’ and 'Mandela', the official biography). Together, they got down to the business of remaking the magazine and making waves.

Bailey fell in love with Sophiatown and its rowdy, urban energy. A slum on the surface, Sophiatown was a mix of Africans, Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, Greeks and Jews doing business and living in relative harmony. The town offered everything white South africa and Europe did not: sex, alcohol, extraordinary characters, style, hope, hopelessness. “Noisy and dramatic,” was how David Coplan described Sophiatown in his 1985 book ‘In Township Tonight!” “A new synthesis of African culture sprang out of its potholed streets, communal water taps, the rectangular jumble of yards, brick and wood dwellings here and eye-catching mansions there. Sophiatown was crime-ridden yet heaved with music and wishes and dreams, vulnerability and stubborness that gave it its swaggering personality.”

Into this heady atmosphere, Bailey launched ‘African Drum’. He quickly cut the title back to ‘Drum’ and assembled a staff of untrained township youngsters into what would be known as the “Drum School” of writers. A few of its graduates – Casey Motsisi, Todd Matshikiza, Ezekiel Mphalele, Bloke Modisane, Bessie Head – went on to become successful novelists, poets, dramatists and composers. To the thousands of blacks who migrated to Johannesburg during the 1940s and ‘50s, ‘Drum’ was a manifesto of social realism. The magazine’s lurid, over-written feature stories, with their violent, tragic, fashionably dressed characters – dice hustlers, jazz musicians, racist policemen, babes and molls – and especially the accompanying pictures, not only entertained Sophiatowns but embodied Sophiatown. Drum portrayed celebrities, especially actors and jazz musicians (who were often the same), as accessible pople who lived within the same poverty-stricken township as their fans. At its peak in the late-1950s, the magazine had editions all over the continent recording “the ladder down the stocking” of Bristish Imperial rule. Its total circulation topped 800,000.

Bailey and his staff took particular care with the covers. The most beloved of all the cover girls was blues singer Dolly Rathebe, an icon to Sophiatown ‘tsotsies’ (gangsters). To them, she was Marilyn Monroe and Josephine Baker rolled into one. Blessed with a husky, sometimes coarse voice, she would wisper, coo, and sing-talk like Nina Simone. She wiggled her hips to the ‘tsotsies’, sang the blues to the troubled, and crooned Yiddish lullabies to the rich Jewish patrons of the Johannesburg jazz scene. Dolly reshaped the whole continent’s sense of African feminine beauty. She was even courted by one of Drum’s writers, Can Themba. Themba, along with literary journalist Bloke Modisane, “Hollywood detective” columnist Arthur Maimane and music critic Todd Matshikiza, were the ears of Drum. Photographers Jurgen Schadeberg, Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane became the eyes that captured the town’s vibrancy. But one personality reigned supreme: Henry Nxumalo, who more than anyone embodied the magazine. “From the coffee plantations of the Gold Coast to the jazz-stung nightclubs of Nigeria,” he wrote in a 1956 blurb, “in the dreaming hamlets of Zululand, among Cape Town’s fun-filled coon life, and Johannesburg’s teeming, thrilling thousands, everywhere, every month, Drum is read and relished.”

After obtaining his junior certificate at a missionary school, Nxumalo trekked down to Jozi, where he served as a messenger at the ‘Bantu World’ newspaper. When World War II erupted, he signed on with the British Protectorate regiment and served as a sergeant in Egypt before coming back to the paper as sports editor. In 1951, he was hired as Drum’s first black reporter. Slim and dapper, he quickly became a familiar presence on the Sophiatown scene, covering crime and club dates with equal verve. Within a year, Nxumalo began writing as “Mr Drum”, a byline under which he produced some powerful exposes. “In those days”, remembered fellow reporter Themba in a posthumous 1985 memoir, “rumour was strong that farmers were ill-treating their labourers in the Bethal district. [Indeed, one had been flogged to death.] Dear ol’ Mr Drum fastened his braces, tied his shoelaces, fixed his Woodrow hat and got on a roll to investigate – simply by getting himself a job as labourer himself, in one of those Bethal potato farms.” It wasn’t just the emotional shock of the labourers’ conditions that excited interest in what Nxumalo wrote, but the courage he displayed in getting a job as a virtual slave and then escaping from it. The piece he wrote turned both Nxumalo and his magazine into urban icons.

Not long afterward, authorities at Johannesburg’s notorious Number Four prison were rumored to have introduced a dehumanizing new way of searching inmates for smuggled items such as tobacco, dagga (cannabis) or anything that could have been hidden in the rectum. Prisoners were lined in a row, naked, and made to skip and jump as they ran in front of their jailers. This was called the ‘Tausa’, or monkey, dance. On 19 January 1954, Nxumalo contrived to get himself arrested in Johannesburg by staying out past the night-time curfew without the required pass. By a stroke of luck, he was sent to Number Four. In “Mr Drum Goes to Goal”, illustrated with clandestine photos, Nxumalo described the ‘Tausa’ dance and other abuses at Number Four. The expose’ caught the prison system by surprise. Authorities were enraged, and Nxumalo suddenly became a figure of great interest to South Africa’s security branch. By then, his exploits as an investigative journalist had earned a number of enemies, among them thugs, crooked politicians, farm owners, and police.

On New Year’s Eve 1955, Nxumalo headed into the warm Sophiatown night, humming to himself. He stopped at his cousin Percy Hlubi’s place and, shortly after seeing in the new year, walked out into the night. His battered body was discovered the following morning by a cousin’s wife on her way to catch the day’s first train. Still in his suit, he was face-down on a patch of dry grass, with one shoe missing and a blood trail that went back a thousand metres to the entrance of Coronation Hospital in Newclare. Nxumalo left a wife, Florence, who died in 1979, and five children. No one was ever convicted of his murder.
Can Themba died of alcohol-related complications in exile in Swaziland, Todd Matshikiza died in exile in Zambia, Nat Nakasa committed suicide in New York and William Bloke Modisane died in exile in West Germany. Dolly Rathebe died on 16 September 2004 from a stroke.


Drum’s home turf is gone too, a victim of the apartheid policy of forced removals from “white areas” – which included a longtime black enclave like Sophiatown. At 5:30am on 10 February 1955, government trucks backed by 2,000 heavily armed police removed the first hundred and ten families to what is now part of Soweto, the black township. Over the next three years, other families followed as bulldozers razed the buildings around them. Before long the place was a wasteland of rubble. A white suburb was developed on the site. The government called it Triomf (Triumph).

Today, Johannesburg – “Jozi” to initiates – is a multi-ethnic sprawl, where Somali Muslims rub shoulders with Nigerian drug lords and Congolese le Sapeur fashionistas. Drum is a mere shadow, resold, repositioned and defanged since its glory days. But the magazine’s early spirit of iconoclasm is being celebrated with a new zest: Drum’s golden era of the ‘50s and ‘60s and Nxumalo’s story have been the subject in the last few years, among a flurry of books, essays, articles and documentaries in SA and abroad, of a feature film, Drum: Stories from Sophiatown (2004), directed by South Africans Zola Maseko and Dumisani Dlamini, produced by Hollyhood’s Chris Sievernich (The Quiet American) and Rudolf Wichmann (Love and Rage), co-written by Jason Filiardi (Bringing Down the House) and starring US-born Taye Diggs (Chicago) and a posse of talented South African actors.

{You can download an excellent video about Drum here}


(Sophiatown is Gone - Miriam Makeba)

I am not exactly someone to judge a book by its cover but I must admit to being sometimes inclined to buy a magazine just for its cover…
Now, here’s a magazine I would certainly buy just for its covers: the Drum magazine of ‘50s and ‘60s South Africa. I might have bought one or two of its more recent editions for their content, but those early ones would have got my money just for the covers. Of course, they are now collector’s items and highly protected by the Black African History Archives (BAHA) and The Bailey Archive, so I doubt that a common mortal like me would have a chance to get hold of one these days. But I can, nonetheless, claim possession of one of those highly coveted t-shirts printed with Drum covers put on the SA market by the very talented, clever and praised Nkhensani Nkhosi, actress and founder/creative director of fashion house Stoned Cherrie and one of the symbols of the New South Africa.

I mean, who, among those of us grown up in Southern Africa knowing of and experiencing, even if only indirectly, the antics of the apartheid system, would have imagined that within that system there was ever a place for a magazine telling through its covers of such a glamourous and exciting Black South Africa? And beyond that, of a Black Africa – there were, in fact, a South African and a West African (based in Ghana) versions of Drum, the latter telling us such amazing stories as Louis Armstrong’s visit to his motherland in February 1961 – precisely when armed struggle against colonial rule in Angola had started?

From a historical perspective, I would venture that that Drum of the ‘50s and early ‘60s could only be a testimony of the resistance of a social makeup the apartheid system (instituted in 1948) hadn’t yet managed to completely suppress, which makes those numbers even more valuable. That is precisely what those fortunate enough to have looked inside its covers will tell you: Drum was a repository of all the gripping stories chronicling the early years of the apartheid regime – except, apparently, for the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, which its legendary owner, Jim Bailey, reportedly didn’t allow to have mentioned in the magazine…

About Bailey, Bongani Madondo and Don Morrison wrote in an investigative story on Drum, What Made Drum Beat?, for the, now defunct, British “Zembla Literary Magazine”, in 2004: (…) After all, nobody knew about sensationalism better than Jim Bailey, a man whose name inspires perjoratives from former friends and victims. Ruthless. Dreamer. Freak. Wannabe Black. Bohemian. Drinker. Rich liberal son of colonialists (and quasi-colonialist himself). But also Visionary. Scholar. God’s gift to African publishing. Bailey’s father, Sir Abe Bailey, was a well-known South African mining magnate, financier and friend of arch-colonialist Cecil John Rhodes. Jim’s mother,Lady Mary Bailey, was an aviatrix whose 1927 solo flight from Croydon to Cape Town is legendary. After graduation from Oxford, young James Richard Abe Bailey joined the World War II British army and became a fighter pilot. Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1940s, he headed to Cape Town, then – as now- a magnet for bored Europeans in search of sun and excitement.

There Bailey met Robert Crisp, sole proprietor of a dull magazine called ‘The African Drum’, previously ‘The Bongo Drum’, which covered the quantly colorful lives of rural blacks who feared God and endured the missionary. Bailey saw an opportunity. All over the world, black people were becoming style-makers and urban culture creators. In New York and Paris, blacks were arbiters of fashion for both the counterculture and the mainstream. The Beat Generation imbibed jazz and the blues, smoked and wrote out of an existentialism espoused by blacks.Poetry, music, fashion – aaah, to be black, Bailey thought. He purchased the publication in 1951 and moved it to Johannesburg, where he imported from England an energetic editor named Anthony Sampson (who later found fame with his ‘Anatomy of Britain’ and 'Mandela', the official biography). Together, they got down to the business of remaking the magazine and making waves.

Bailey fell in love with Sophiatown and its rowdy, urban energy. A slum on the surface, Sophiatown was a mix of Africans, Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, Greeks and Jews doing business and living in relative harmony. The town offered everything white South africa and Europe did not: sex, alcohol, extraordinary characters, style, hope, hopelessness. “Noisy and dramatic,” was how David Coplan described Sophiatown in his 1985 book ‘In Township Tonight!” “A new synthesis of African culture sprang out of its potholed streets, communal water taps, the rectangular jumble of yards, brick and wood dwellings here and eye-catching mansions there. Sophiatown was crime-ridden yet heaved with music and wishes and dreams, vulnerability and stubborness that gave it its swaggering personality.”

Into this heady atmosphere, Bailey launched ‘African Drum’. He quickly cut the title back to ‘Drum’ and assembled a staff of untrained township youngsters into what would be known as the “Drum School” of writers. A few of its graduates – Casey Motsisi, Todd Matshikiza, Ezekiel Mphalele, Bloke Modisane, Bessie Head – went on to become successful novelists, poets, dramatists and composers. To the thousands of blacks who migrated to Johannesburg during the 1940s and ‘50s, ‘Drum’ was a manifesto of social realism. The magazine’s lurid, over-written feature stories, with their violent, tragic, fashionably dressed characters – dice hustlers, jazz musicians, racist policemen, babes and molls – and especially the accompanying pictures, not only entertained Sophiatowns but embodied Sophiatown. Drum portrayed celebrities, especially actors and jazz musicians (who were often the same), as accessible pople who lived within the same poverty-stricken township as their fans. At its peak in the late-1950s, the magazine had editions all over the continent recording “the ladder down the stocking” of Bristish Imperial rule. Its total circulation topped 800,000.

Bailey and his staff took particular care with the covers. The most beloved of all the cover girls was blues singer Dolly Rathebe, an icon to Sophiatown ‘tsotsies’ (gangsters). To them, she was Marilyn Monroe and Josephine Baker rolled into one. Blessed with a husky, sometimes coarse voice, she would wisper, coo, and sing-talk like Nina Simone. She wiggled her hips to the ‘tsotsies’, sang the blues to the troubled, and crooned Yiddish lullabies to the rich Jewish patrons of the Johannesburg jazz scene. Dolly reshaped the whole continent’s sense of African feminine beauty. She was even courted by one of Drum’s writers, Can Themba. Themba, along with literary journalist Bloke Modisane, “Hollywood detective” columnist Arthur Maimane and music critic Todd Matshikiza, were the ears of Drum. Photographers Jurgen Schadeberg, Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane became the eyes that captured the town’s vibrancy. But one personality reigned supreme: Henry Nxumalo, who more than anyone embodied the magazine. “From the coffee plantations of the Gold Coast to the jazz-stung nightclubs of Nigeria,” he wrote in a 1956 blurb, “in the dreaming hamlets of Zululand, among Cape Town’s fun-filled coon life, and Johannesburg’s teeming, thrilling thousands, everywhere, every month, Drum is read and relished.”

After obtaining his junior certificate at a missionary school, Nxumalo trekked down to Jozi, where he served as a messenger at the ‘Bantu World’ newspaper. When World War II erupted, he signed on with the British Protectorate regiment and served as a sergeant in Egypt before coming back to the paper as sports editor. In 1951, he was hired as Drum’s first black reporter. Slim and dapper, he quickly became a familiar presence on the Sophiatown scene, covering crime and club dates with equal verve. Within a year, Nxumalo began writing as “Mr Drum”, a byline under which he produced some powerful exposes. “In those days”, remembered fellow reporter Themba in a posthumous 1985 memoir, “rumour was strong that farmers were ill-treating their labourers in the Bethal district. [Indeed, one had been flogged to death.] Dear ol’ Mr Drum fastened his braces, tied his shoelaces, fixed his Woodrow hat and got on a roll to investigate – simply by getting himself a job as labourer himself, in one of those Bethal potato farms.” It wasn’t just the emotional shock of the labourers’ conditions that excited interest in what Nxumalo wrote, but the courage he displayed in getting a job as a virtual slave and then escaping from it. The piece he wrote turned both Nxumalo and his magazine into urban icons.

Not long afterward, authorities at Johannesburg’s notorious Number Four prison were rumored to have introduced a dehumanizing new way of searching inmates for smuggled items such as tobacco, dagga (cannabis) or anything that could have been hidden in the rectum. Prisoners were lined in a row, naked, and made to skip and jump as they ran in front of their jailers. This was called the ‘Tausa’, or monkey, dance. On 19 January 1954, Nxumalo contrived to get himself arrested in Johannesburg by staying out past the night-time curfew without the required pass. By a stroke of luck, he was sent to Number Four. In “Mr Drum Goes to Goal”, illustrated with clandestine photos, Nxumalo described the ‘Tausa’ dance and other abuses at Number Four. The expose’ caught the prison system by surprise. Authorities were enraged, and Nxumalo suddenly became a figure of great interest to South Africa’s security branch. By then, his exploits as an investigative journalist had earned a number of enemies, among them thugs, crooked politicians, farm owners, and police.

On New Year’s Eve 1955, Nxumalo headed into the warm Sophiatown night, humming to himself. He stopped at his cousin Percy Hlubi’s place and, shortly after seeing in the new year, walked out into the night. His battered body was discovered the following morning by a cousin’s wife on her way to catch the day’s first train. Still in his suit, he was face-down on a patch of dry grass, with one shoe missing and a blood trail that went back a thousand metres to the entrance of Coronation Hospital in Newclare. Nxumalo left a wife, Florence, who died in 1979, and five children. No one was ever convicted of his murder.
Can Themba died of alcohol-related complications in exile in Swaziland, Todd Matshikiza died in exile in Zambia, Nat Nakasa committed suicide in New York and William Bloke Modisane died in exile in West Germany. Dolly Rathebe died on 16 September 2004 from a stroke.


Drum’s home turf is gone too, a victim of the apartheid policy of forced removals from “white areas” – which included a longtime black enclave like Sophiatown. At 5:30am on 10 February 1955, government trucks backed by 2,000 heavily armed police removed the first hundred and ten families to what is now part of Soweto, the black township. Over the next three years, other families followed as bulldozers razed the buildings around them. Before long the place was a wasteland of rubble. A white suburb was developed on the site. The government called it Triomf (Triumph).

Today, Johannesburg – “Jozi” to initiates – is a multi-ethnic sprawl, where Somali Muslims rub shoulders with Nigerian drug lords and Congolese le Sapeur fashionistas. Drum is a mere shadow, resold, repositioned and defanged since its glory days. But the magazine’s early spirit of iconoclasm is being celebrated with a new zest: Drum’s golden era of the ‘50s and ‘60s and Nxumalo’s story have been the subject in the last few years, among a flurry of books, essays, articles and documentaries in SA and abroad, of a feature film, Drum: Stories from Sophiatown (2004), directed by South Africans Zola Maseko and Dumisani Dlamini, produced by Hollyhood’s Chris Sievernich (The Quiet American) and Rudolf Wichmann (Love and Rage), co-written by Jason Filiardi (Bringing Down the House) and starring US-born Taye Diggs (Chicago) and a posse of talented South African actors.

{You can download an excellent video about Drum here}


(Sophiatown is Gone - Miriam Makeba)

OUTBLOGGING @ AFRICANPATH – II

As at least some of you might have noticed, my first article at Africanpath received almost immediately a response from Dennis Matanda, one of the site’s resident bloggers.
In my second article, posted today, I seek to address some of the issues raised by Matanda in his last and previous articles. In doing so, I deal with three discrete cases from African economic history, namely Ghana, Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Again, you can read and comment it either Here or at Africanpath.

As at least some of you might have noticed, my first article at Africanpath received almost immediately a response from Dennis Matanda, one of the site’s resident bloggers.
In my second article, posted today, I seek to address some of the issues raised by Matanda in his last and previous articles. In doing so, I deal with three discrete cases from African economic history, namely Ghana, Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Again, you can read and comment it either Here or at Africanpath.

MY DEBUT @ AFRICANPATH'S GUEST BLOGGER SERIES

I've gladly decided to oblige to a kind invitation by Joshua Wanyama, AfricanPath's Editor, to participate in his site as Guest Blogger. So, from now on, once in a while I will be "outblogging" there. My first post went up today and is entitled "Are We All Losing The Plot?". It can be accessed and commented both at AfricanPath and Here.

N.B.: I decided to bring back this post to the front page because it just received a most welcome and thought-provoking comment by Connie Hilliard - Professor of African History at the University of North Texas, USA.

I've gladly decided to oblige to a kind invitation by Joshua Wanyama, AfricanPath's Editor, to participate in his site as Guest Blogger. So, from now on, once in a while I will be "outblogging" there. My first post went up today and is entitled "Are We All Losing The Plot?". It can be accessed and commented both at AfricanPath and Here.

N.B.: I decided to bring back this post to the front page because it just received a most welcome and thought-provoking comment by Connie Hilliard - Professor of African History at the University of North Texas, USA.