The Drum Decade: urban black life
The 1950s was the decade in which the African National Congress and its alliance partners launched the massive Defiance Campaign, a huge peaceful affront on white supremacy. It was the decade in which the Freedom Charter, the central document of the anti-racist movement, was written on the basis of contributions from all over the country. And it was the decade in which the apartheid state responded with massive treason trials for those who defied it.The 1950s also saw a new generation of black writers talking about the conditions of their lives in their own voices - voices with a distinctive stamp and style. The popular Drum magazine in the 1950s was their forum, and encouraged their emergence. It depicted a vibrant urban black culture for the first time - a world of jazz, shebeens (illegal drinking dens), and flamboyant gangsters (tsotsis).
Reportage blurred into fiction: there were satirical stories ridiculing the discriminatory and repressive policies of the state, while others provided harrowing details of the effect of apartheid legislation on people's lives. These writers recorded urban deprivation, but also the resilience of people who survived "without visible means of subsistence".
Es'kia (formerly Ezekiel) Mphahlele later described the style of Drum writers as "racy, agitated, impressionistic, it quivered with a nervous energy, a caustic wit". These writers may have been politically cynical rather than directly invovled in politics (and their dominant sexism has been noted by many), but they did create a vibrant voice that speaks in the truly original tones of the urban black experience in South Africa, and for that alone are highly valued.
Their work ranged from the investigative journalism of Henry Nxumalo to the witty social commentary of Todd Matshikiza; others such as Nat Nakasa, Can Themba and Mphahlele moved toward embodying their visions of black South African life in poetry or fiction.
Later, Nakasa edited a literary journal, The Classic, that published work such as Themba's story The Suit (1963), now regarded as a classic of South African literature. It has been adapted for the stage and is still touring the world in Peter Brook's production. Themba was banned by the apartheid state and died in exile, an alcoholic, in 1968, but others such as Mphahlele pursued their literary careers (see below).
Lewis Nkosi became a noted literary critic in Europe and the United States. Other notable writers connected in some way to Drum include William Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane, Dyke Sentso, James Matthews, Peter Clarke, Richard Rive, Jordan Ngubane, Alex La Guma and Casey Motsisi. Modisane wrote the autobiography Blame Me on History (1963), Matthews has written much poetry and a novel, and Rive wrote Buckingham Palace, District Six (1986), about life in that coloured Cape Town area, and two novels about South African states of emergency, decades apart, Emergency (1964) and Emergency Continued (1989).
The Drum Decade, edited by Michael Chapman, and A Good Looking Corpse, by Mike Nicol, anthologise and comment on key works of this era.
For the role played by Drum writers in the 1950s, visit Dispatch newspaper
E'skia Mphahlele's autobiographical Down Second Avenue (1959) is a landmark in the development of South African fiction. Set in a village and a township near Pretoria, the text records in evocative language the resilience of various female characters in Mphahlele's life, who defy poverty and urban squalor to bring him up. At the same time, they are presented with complexity and depth - his grandmother, for one, is a rather tyrannical figure.
Mphahlele went on to write critiques The African Image 1962, short stories Man Must Live 1946, In Corner B 1967, as well as further novels, including The Wanderers 1971, in some ways an extension of the autobiographical form of Down Second Avenue. It articulated his own experiences, first as an adult in South Africa and then his move into exile (he settled in Nigeria in 1957, returning to South Africa in 1977). He also wrote poetry and autobiography. Taken as a whole, Mphahlele's oeuvre represents one of the most important views of the life experience and developing views of a politically aware South African; this is the work of a black man taking the urban scenario as his subject matter and moving beyond the sometimes contradictory messages of the mission-educated generation.
