| Abstrakt: |
In post-apartheid South Africa, the 1950s era has been romanticized through posters, photographs, a feature film, and television commercials. Much of the visual iconography and the stories come from the pages of Drum, a black readership magazine that became the largest circulation publication in South Africa, and reached readers in many other parts of the continent. Despite the visibility of the magazine as a cultural icon and an extensive scholarly literature on Drum of the 1950s, the lively journalism of the magazine's writers is unfamiliar to most South Africans. Writers rather than journalists, the early Drum generation employed writing strategies and literary tactics that drew from popular fiction rather than from reporterly or literary essay styles. The writing was confined to small and more ephemeral pieces, and the writers did not explicitly set out to break journalistic conventions or locate themselves in a literary political black press tradition. But the body of writing produced by the Drum writers of the 1950s had an emphasis on social context that is implicitly, but powerfully, political. A close analysis of the articles shows that novelistic devices such as scene-by-scene description, first-person point of view, the use of local lingo, the personal voice, and what Tom Wolfe called "status-life details" allowed the journalists to write township life into existence. This contributed to an "improvisation" of identity for urban black South Africans in the first decade of apartheid, and a new kind of literary journalism for the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
