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Bailey’s History Archive(opens in a new tab) (BAHA) houses the largest historical photographic archive in South Africa. The archive includes photographs from Drum magazine, Golden City Post and other publications. Founded in 1951, under its publisher Jim Bailey, Drum, became a ground- breaking popular Pan African magazine. At its height Drum had a distribution of around 1,000,000 across five editions in South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, East Africa and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia today). Readership was likely 20 times that figure. The publication was heavily influenced by international picture magazines like Life and Picture Post and adapted that genre to an African context. The publishing of Drum took place when the ‘winds of change’ were blowing through the continent after the WWII. It captured this period of independence and urbanization throughout Anglophone Africa.
Drum Magazine in Context
Drum in South Africa was published during a very oppressive period of Apartheid and media repression. The emergence of Drum also coincided with a time of rapid modernity in South Africa and the continent. As Colette Guldimann understood it, “to represent black modernity, South Africans had to look elsewhere and they turned to popular American and African-American images. Drum magazine's pages were filled with African-American jazz and its South Africa counterpart, boxers, gangsters, detectives and prominent African-Americans. Drum magazine combined its popular content with some of the finest investigative journalism ever to be written and thus provided political coverage of a crucial period in South Africa's struggle.” [1]
The African content that is represented in the archive is complex and dynamic. The thousands of images reflected in the newly digitized collection provide insight into the diverse stories and social political context of Drum magazine at a critical period of history. It is a record of the ‘inside voice’ of a continent reflected by writers and photographers in a time of African urbanization and radical change. Drum disrupted coverage of Africa which was dominated at the time by outside voices, often with a biased perspective. It represented a powerful antidote to that perception.
Drum was also known as ‘the University’ for writers Henry Nxumalo (Mr Drum), Lewis Nkosi, Casey Motsitsi, Es’kia Mphahlele, Nat Nkasa, Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane, Can Temba, Todd Matshakiza, Henry Ofori, Cameron Duodu, Nelson Ottah, Cyprian Ekwensi, Jackie Heyns and others. Drum was a place of learning and a launchpad for their careers and creative outputs.
Similarly for photographers such as Jurgen Schadeberg (see his archive here), Bob Gosani, Peter Magubane, G.R. Naidoo, Ranjith Kally, Alf Kumalo, Ernest Cole, James Barnor, Joseph Taro, Mathew Faji, Christian Gbagbo, Drum publications presented an environment that made it possible to develop and flourish.
As Jim Bailey put it, “Drum enabled us to summon up from the spirit world writers and photographers, dancers and cover-girls, politicians and yes, martyrs in the cause of human freedom: at least record them, sometimes we did a lot more than that.”[2]
Digital Collection Curation
In the process of selecting images for digitization, the Photographic Legacy Project (PLP) consulted with the owner of Drum, Prospero Bailey, son of its founder, Jim Bailey and its archivist, Bongi Maswanganyi to help shape our curatorial decisions. We chose to expand on the legacy of Drum beyond the photographs in the archive and its association with South Africa. Recognizing the deep historical value of this collection, we included material that complemented a viewer’s experience of Drum in that period. For those reasons we included examples of the adverts, covers and a selection of stories in Drum. Archivist, Bongi Maswanganyi believes you can’t just see Drum magazine without understanding the broader context in South Africa and the continent. With regard to Drum stories, Maswanganyi chose popular stories that reflected a range of topics, including politics, social life, sports, music and personalities to give a diverse mix of the stories of the period. In a time when the continent was changing rapidly and the withdrawal or challenge to colonial rule, Drum was an important platform.
“Drum was a voice for African countries, very popular, influential and successful throughout the continent.” - Bongi Maswanganyi, Archivist, Bailey History Archive
The adverts in Drum played a big role in the message that was sent to its readership and are an important part of the digital collection. Besides bringing in income, she says, “the adverts were part of the mushrooming urban middle class who were associated with urban consumption and cosmopolitanism at the time.”[3]
Some of the language in Drum which was popular and in vogue at the time would not be used in a present context. The archivists and host institution wish to state that the language from the original magazine in the digital archive, does not reflect what would be written today but acknowledges it as the voice of a period in history.
[1] Guldiman, C. "A Symbol of the New African": Drum magazine, popular culture and the formation of black urban subjectivity in 1950s South Africa. p8, as part of her doctoral thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2003.
[2] Bailey History Archive website, About Page, https://baha.co.za/about/.
[3] Conversation with Bongi Maswanganyi, Bailey History Archive.
