ABSTRACT
Drum magazine is crucial in South African literary and cultural history.1 Its short stories are frequently reprinted, and its political exposes remain models of investigative journalism. Embracing a modernity apparently yearned for by the rapidly growing black urban population of the time, Drum’s circulation rose steadily through the 1950s, letters poured in from readers, and its journalists were emulated and adored. Although both Lewis Nkosi and Ezekiel Mphahlele have stressed the constraint the magazine placed on writers, because of its ‘ready-made plots’,2 Drum ran regular short story competitions and in other ways gave space to a group of writers who made up what has since been called a South African literary renaissance:3 Alex la Guma, Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Richard Rive, Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi, Todd Matshikiza, Arthur Maimane and Peter Clarke, besides Mphahlele and Nkosi themselves. For these black writers, the magazine offered a vehicle that was part training ground and part enabling community. It offered quite the reverse for women. Only two black South African women published books written in English in the 1960s-Noni Jabavu and Bessie Head-and both did so from outside the country. Moreover, as the threatening manifestations of the ‘nice-time girl’ in Head’s A Question of Power tell us and as her recently resurrected early work, The Cardinals, suggests, Head survived as a writer in spite of Drum.
