The drum decade

Drum was launched as a popular magazine in the 1950s and quickly came to reflect the image and interests of the urban African. Its reports of the Defiance Campaign, the Congress of the People and the Treason Trial shared column-space with stories of soccer, sex and sin. This combination of yellow-press sensation and social concern gave rise to the short story by black South African writers, and several of Drum's writers established themselves as important figures in South African literature: Es'kia Mphahlele, Can Themba, Richard Rive, James Matthews, Nat Nakasa and Casey Motsisi. This anthology presents a selection of more than 90 stories that appeared in Drum. They depict the danger, the poverty and the spurious glamour of Sophiatown, where the New African - the tsotsi, the jazz musician, the journalist and the writer - affirmed identity and style and refused to submit to the government's determination to 'retribalize'. This second edition (third reprint) contains a new foreword by John Matshikiza in addition to the essay by Michael Chapman, which addresses the significance of the magazine and puts it into historical perspective: 'Most of the writers were concerned with more than just telling a story. They were concerned with what was happening to their people and, in consequence, with moral and social questions.'