Inventing Africa in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Imagination, Politics and Transnationalism in Drum Magazine
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 65; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00020180601035625
ISSN1469-2872
Autores Tópico(s)South African History and Culture
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I am grateful to my two anonymous readers who made invaluable suggestions on this article. Your comments have also redirected my approach to the rest of the project on 'popular media and transnationalism in Africa' from which this article comes. Thanks too to those who made comments and suggestions when I read a draft of the paper at the Wits Interdisciplinary Research Seminar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Notes 1. 'Message from an African', The African Drum March 1951. 2. The wish to realise a multiracial society in South Africa was put to practice and tested in the offices of Drum where African, European and Asian staff worked next to each other, a rarity in most work places in the country at the time. Also, the European members of staff frequently visited the homes of their African colleagues in the townships and patronised shebeens for drinks and dances, therefore practically living the message of multiracial coexistence that the magazine promoted in some of its articles. 3. However note that in the introduction to her memoirs An Eccentric Marriage (2005), Barbara Bailey, Jim Bailey's widow, magnanimously calls Bailey "a secular missionary", asserting, "I believe he was not a commercial publisher at all" to emphasize Bailey's contribution to the growth of media in Africa through several of newspaper and magazine ventures in Anglophone Africa. Barbara's comments seem to suggest that Bailey was less interested in the profitability of the magazine which may only partially have been true for a magazine whose readership became increasingly restricted to Africans, as Drum was, and which would have therefore had to depend on circulation and advertisement to cover most of its costs and turn a profit. 4. See David Rabkin (1975) Rabkin, D. 1975. "Drum Magazine (1951–1961) and the Works of Black South African Writers Associated with It". DPhil. thesis, University of Leeds [Google Scholar], Michael Chapman (1989 Chapman, M. 1989. "More than Telling a Story: Drum and Its Significance in Black South African Writing". In The Drum Decade, Edited by: Michael, Chapman. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. [Google Scholar] and 1996), and Dorothy Driver (1995) Driver, D. 1995. "Drum Magazine (1951–99) and the Spatial Configurations of Gender". In Text, Theory and Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, Edited by: Darian-Smith, Kate, Gunner, Liz and Sarah, Nuttal. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar] among scholars who portray Drum as essentially a popular South African magazine that mainly produced melodramatic artistic and literary sketches of the new urban experiences by blacks in South Africa/Johannesburg/Sophiatown. The hallmark of this kind of representation is depicted as being the magazine's evocation of the "spirit of jazz and tsotsi (petty gangster)" life according to Chapman (1996 Chapman, M. 1996. Southern African Literatures, London: Longman. [Google Scholar]: 238). 5. The Sophiatown myth is quite resilient and so seductive to the extent that even in a book such as David Goodhew's Respectability and Resistance (2004) that claims to be concerned with recording the history of the resistance struggles by the town's inhabitants against state discrimination and to depict "working-class respectability that characterized much of daily life in Sophiatown" cannot avoid delving into the popular images of the "shebeen queen and the gangster rubbing shoulders with the washerwoman and the labourer". 6. For the most recent work that links Drum to the transatlantic diasporas celebrating the cultural connections to America, see Michael Titlestad, Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage (2004) and Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (1994). 7. See Stefan Helgesson (2004) Helgesson, S. Shifting Fields: Imagining Literary Renewal in Itinerário and Drum. Paper presented at the Wits Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series. University of the Witwatersrand. [Google Scholar] and Peter Benson (1986) Benson, P. 1986. Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] among scholars whose work engage with transnational media in Africa, but who place special emphasis on those publications deemed to be 'intellectual' such as Itinerario and Transition as opposed to those assumed to be 'popular' such as Drum. 8. I use the term 'inventing' Africa here, partially as proposed by Mudimbe (1988) Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, London: James Currey. [Google Scholar], to suggest that indeed Africa as a distinct polity had not yet broadly been used and accepted by the very people who lived in those regions to which it was meant to refer. 9. The current Drum has re-introduced the short story tradition intended to capture the experiences of its South African readership in a time of transition and transformation, which appears to imitate the practice of the earlier Drum. 10. Chapman (1989) Chapman, M. 1989. "More than Telling a Story: Drum and Its Significance in Black South African Writing". In The Drum Decade, Edited by: Michael, Chapman. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. [Google Scholar] estimates that Drum published over 90 stories between 1951 and 1958. 11. The Healers and Two Thousand Seasons are two of his books that specifically seek to reconstruct Africa's history of struggle against invasion and rule by foreigners through several centuries and have been described as having a pan-African vision. 12. The London edition of Drum magazine, which is completely unrelated to the South African one, seems also to rely on the invocation of the ideas of pan-Africanism, the black Atlantic and the African Diasporic interconnections in its engagement with the effects or trajectories of modernity in Africa. The use of the famous Can Themba 'at work' photo on its web-page illustrates the connections that this recent 'edition' of Drum seeks to make with the old idea of Drum as a magazine for the 'new black man.' See the London version of Drum at: http://www.drumonline.net/drumonline/index.cfm?objectid=6525E789-CFF0-761D-0AD998C6B8796B9D. Beginning mid 2005, the South African Drum, which is published weekly, has reintroduced the publication of short stories from its readers. This was one of the key features of Drum magazine in the past.
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