The Press: South African Drumbeats

In the teeming Negro and colored shantytowns of Johannesburg, where newspapers and magazines are a rarity, a truck piled high with magazines rumbled through the unpaved streets last week. Wherever it stopped, hundreds of people swarmed about it, buying the magazine: The African Drum. A 5¢ Life-size monthly, Drum has in less than three years become the leading spokesman for South Africa’s 9,000,000 Negro and colored population. In South Africa, torn by racial strife, Drum’s popularity is easily xplained. “We air the views and grievances of the blacks,” says Publisher James R. Bailey, a white man, “and make them feel that Communism isn’t the solution to their problems.”

A spotlight on the problems created by poverty, unemployment, disease, crime, and a fanatic white-supremacist government is not all that Drum gives the 65,000 readers who buy it every month. Its some 40 illustrated pages serve up a blend of Negro and colored (i.e., mixed blood) life, sports, society, sex, scandal and politics that South Africa’s non-whites can get in no other magazine. It was started by Publisher Bailey, 33, an ex-R.A.F. combat pilot, who settled down to raise sheep and breed horses after the war. As editor, Bailey picked a white South African friend, Anthony Sampson, 26, whom he had known at Oxford where they had often discussed South Africa’s race problem. Drum is staffed largely by non-white writers.

Wired & Whipped. Both Bailey and Sampson faced opposition from the Malan government, whose nightmare is “whites drowning in a black sea.” The government threatened to choke off Drum’s paper supply for such things as printing pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt shaking hands with a Negro. Police have also taken to shadowing Drum staffers, checking on where they go and whom they see. Despite the threats, Drum has made its mark with a series of spectacular exposes.

Its first came after it investigated the vast potato and corn farms 100 miles east of Johannesburg, where convicts and contract laborers were hired by white farmers. The farmers had been accused of fierce brutality, but had been cleared by the Malan government. Drum dressed one of its staffers in rags, got him on to the farms, later slipped in a photographer.

They found that many workers were imprisoned behind barbed wire, slept at night on concrete slabs and were treated like galley slaves. Mounted “boss boys” rode among them during the day, beating them with bullwhips. Laborers died in filthy “hospitals” where a doctor was seldom seen. Often workers did not see the contracts they supposedly had “signed,” had no idea what was in them.

When Drum published its illustrated expose (see cut), it touched off a roar of protest round the world. The British government sent a special investigator, and the respected South African Institute of Race Relations confirmed Drum’s charges with its own survey. The protests forced the reluctant government to make some reforms. Drum dug up other similar stories such as a series on wealthy wine farmers who paid their non-white laborers partly in wine, thus kept them in a state of uncomplaining drunkenness. It followed up with articles on education, child care, home building and hygiene.

Witch Doctors & Suspicions. Drum had to fight hostility and suspicion not only from the government but also from its readers; they could not believe that any magazine backed by whites was up to any good. Drum is still occasionally criticized by readers. Once when it charged that some witch doctors were encouraging tribal ritual murder, the editors had to placate a delegation of seven witch doctors who went to Drum’s editorial office in full raiment to protest strongly the “slur on a noble profession.”

Drum has never overcome the government’s hostility, but it long ago conquered the suspicions of its Negro and colored readers. It is also regarded with approval by many anti-Malan whites in South Africa. Summed up one white: “Drum makes South Africa’s segregated, despised non-whites feel like people.”