The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s

Authors

Shane Graham, Utah State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Book Review

Journal/Book Title/Conference

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature

Volume

38.4

Publication Date

2007

First Page

169

Last Page

173

Abstract

The negritude movement had Presence Africaine; the Harlem Renaissance had Crisis and Opportunity; South African writers of the 1950s had Drum magazine. Paul Gready has written that Drum's "flashy muck-raking journalistic style attempted to capture the vivid life of the townships. Drum became a symbol of a new urban South Africa" (146); for Rob Nixon, it "amplified the voices of a defiantly impure cosmopolitanism, projecting an urban look and ethos" (28). Lewis Nkosi, who went to work for the magazine in 1957, said that Drum "wasn't so much a magazine as it was a symbol of the new African cut adrift from the tribal reserve--urbanised, eager, fast-talking and brash" (Home and Exile 8). The magazine serialized novels by Alan Paton and Peter Abrahams, and occasionally published the work of black American writers like Langston Hughes.

Comments

Double Review

Recommended Citation

Double Review: Michael Chapman, ed., The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s and Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner, ed., Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 38.4 (2007): 169-73