D('l£r, ..D.

"1k Tu\,,,\0"-111{l, is :~hoJ +d\(/\ If\ ~h~"

lit ~* +My~ of- ~ ¢fCt>.1'- L.tei"lv/e. .
(0\. D~i~k M+(i~Q.. o.~ fp.V\~ A4lw~\\. Ca.mhnJ~~
19

The fabulous fifties: short fiction

~IV~ / S 12J PI eS<; '),01).. - :5 B::J. -lt09 in English
DOROTHY DRIVER

In the 1950S the most popular literary form for publication was the short story:
stories were not only the staple of magazines, which themselves formed a sta­
ple of entertainment before the advent of television, but were also frequently
gathered into anthologies, often for schools. Black writers' attraction to the
form has usually been explained by its hospitality to those who lacked the
domestic space, privacy and leisure time, and perhaps the literary confidence,
too, required for novels, but crucial, also, in the 1950S was the publishing
opportunity provided by Drum magazine, which has given to this period the
name the 'Drum decade' . However, Lewis Nkosi's term 'fabulous' in his essay
'The Fabulous Decade' encapsulates the period's extraordinary atmosphere
of romantic self-construction. Young black intellectuals, writing in English,
were entering a modernity that seemed, still, theirs for the taking, and a
small white avant-garde (mostly English-speaking but also including young
Afrikaners) were eager to associate with them or to affiliate through writing,
as if their combined presence could reverse - like a fable - the effects of
apartheid.
Underpinned as it was by a liberal humanist ethos, the predominant mode
of the English-language culture of the 1950S was literary realism of the kind
that valorised witness and protest: art was subjugated to life. (The term
'realism' includes Georg Lukacs's critical or bourgeois realism, naturalism,
social realism and other variants.) But what primarily distinguished the fifties'
fiction from that of earlier decades was the move from the countryside ­
the land or farm as home base, or the veld as the site of romance - to
the city or small town. The urban settings and revised urban-rural relations
brought into being different kinds of fictional characters and concerns, and
then also different perspectives and conventions: apartheid's sinister sequences
of disposseSSion (ofland, home, mobility, education, career and so on) meant
that white and black writers - drawing on their entirely different experiences

387
 DOROTHY DRIVER
Short fiction in English

of the rural and urban - produced a literature that was racially distinctive, along with Singleness of event and effect. However, the ironic strategies
although the black writers' education in English also brought them to share, if available through what Nadine Gordimer has instead called the short story's
then sometimes to resist, the values and conventions of that English tradition. 'fragmented and restless form' (Gordimer, 'Flash of Fireflies', p. 180) arguably
South African realism had long been servf d by the use of contrasting helped give birth to an African modernism on South African soil as distinctive,
perspectives - racial, political, economic, religious, generational and sexual­ ifalso as variable, as that of the Harlem Renaissance, but open to a non-ethnic
with race or racial attitudes often functioning as the fundamental opposition. definition of 'African' . This interest in experimentalism was short-lived. In
Yet when Nkosi called some of the period's black writing 'journalistic fact the Black Consciousness writing of subsequent decades (whether for writers
parading outrageously as imaginative literature' (Nkosi, Home and Exile, p. or for critics speaking on their behalf) the preference would be for a social
132), he identified a key problem not only for black writers but also for realism or naturalism without the tonal complexities that developed irony as
all contemporary writers of realism - to distil the deeper significances of a ambiguity rather than retaining it as mere contrast. Thus while the self-aware
world whose surface realities needed nonetheless to be mapped in the new (self-ironising) tum to irony was one of the products of apartheid it was also
complexities created by apartheid. For a counterexample to mere 'journalistic one of its casualties, stifled by ideological shifts as well as the censorship and
fact', Nkosi marshalled something more than simply an irony of contrasting bannings that threatened the existence ofblack writing in English. However,
perspectives: he commended a story by Alex La Guma for its 'suggestive for Gordimer and]acobson, the deft, ironic, tonal play driving, especially, their
language' and for a sustained irony that revealed the ' absurdity' oflile under short fiction was part of what accounted for the flourishing of their literary
apartheid (Home and Exile, pp. 137-8). In a similar frame, Ezekiel (later, Es'kia)
Mphahlele claimed in his own writing a shift from the escapism of Man must
Live (1946) first into protest and later into 'the ironic meeting berween protest White English-language writers
and acceptance in their widest terms' (Down Second Avenue, p. 205). Nkosi
and Mphahlele thus not only developed ironic ambiguity as an indicator Novelists and short-story writers had already measured their distance from
of excellence but also foregrounded what would in South African literary racism, African dispossession under colonialism and the bourgeois hegemony
criticism become a major question relating to 1950S fiction and beyond: is it, of 'Englishness', but apartheid brought some new directions . For instance,
or should it be, escape or protest or art? Paton's 'Death of a Tsotsi' (Trek, March 1952) shifted from the 'distorted,
The explosion of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) on to the sentimental, if meliorative vision' offered in his pre-apartheid novel (Nkosi,
world stage had created an international readership eager to learn more Home and Exile, p. 5), and his 'A Drink in the Passage' (Africa South 4:3 [19 60 )
about South African apartheid, which encouraged the production of texts took up with a new acuteness and capacity for nuance the complex dynamic
engaged with truth-telling. At the same time (whatever the actual relevance between an African sculptor and an Afrikaner who has invited him for a drink.
ofrealism at this moment ofethical crisis), local political exigencies produced a If, as his biographer puts it, apartheid meant that 'iron had entered Paton's
dissident literary culture that was then, and later, mostly appreciative ofnovels soul' (Alexander, Alan Paton, p. 328), a new irony had too.
that - as Lukacs put it - 'sharpen[ed) the edge of social contradictions' and Herman Charles Bosman offers a second case in point. Well established
produced' change and development' in characters' agency or self-recognition, by 1948 as an English-language-short story-writer with an ambiguous cul­
or perhaps (pace Lukacs) in the readers' consciousness instead, rather than tural affiliation to rural Afrikaners, Bosman had celebrated the National Party
simply adhering to what Lukacs saw as the more 'static' representations of victory as a triumph against British cultural imperialism (see Chapman, South­
naturalistic realism (Lukacs, Studies in European Realism, pp. 170-1; Meaning of ern African Literatures, pp. 191-2). His early stories were deeply ironic yet
Contemporary Realism, pp. 34-5), or - on the other hand entirely - to an art depicted a securely rooted Afrikaner rural community. Now, just before his
that eschewed politics. Critical expectations around realism became equally untimely death in 1951, Bosman published a set of 'inconclusive voorkamer
complex and ideolOgically loaded in relation to the short story. debates' in Lily Rabkin's Forum (Siebert, '''A More Sophisticated Bosman"',
The short story is often considered to be more obedient to convention p. 74); these appeared weekly berween 15 April 1950 and 12 October 195 1
than the novel: it is said to require temporal and spatial unity, for instance, (voorkamer is Afrikaans for front room or parlour). This generically experimental

388 389
 DOROTHY DRI V ER Short fiction in English

story sequence disrupts communal coherence through the use not simply and only short-story collection, Debbie Go Home (1961), was published
conflicting perspectives but also of formal fragmentation (see Gray, and was well received, its US title, Tales from a Troubled Land,
Larger', and also Chapter 18 in this volume). istanamg as a reminder of the marketability of South African fiction that told
Four of the major white fiction writers of the.] 950S were Jewish: Nadine 'truths' about apartheid. Common to this writing was an engagement with
Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, PhylliS Altman and Harold Bloom. If English-. social transformations wrought by apartheid and its social engineering, or
speaking South African writers were already politically alienated from the related processes of urbanisation, with setting often functioning as an
Afrikaner nationalists, then Jewish writers were additionally alienated through in the production of character and plot. The writers all reveal more or
the publicly articulated pro-German sympathies of many leading Afrikaner anxious efforts to represent what a reviewer in the 1950S astutely called
politicians (although it must be said that anti-Semitism was also to be found common measure, the voiceless African' (H. V. L. S., review, p. 174),
among English-speaking South Africans, as was anti-black racism amongJew­ alUlOUclJ. there is interest as well in other kinds of human relations, usually

ish and other white South Africans). For Nkosi, one of the youngest Drum. informed by the political context.
journalists and the period's most astute cultural critic, Jews brought a 'cultural Gordimer, who had produced over fifty stories by the time she turned
vitality' to the 'desert' of a white South Africa 'immune to all the graces published more than half of these internationally (unlike Bosman, who
African tribal life and to the contemplative pleasures ofEuropean cultural life', specifically refused to publish other than locally). Her first three stories
and their 'mitigating human presence' made a fusion seem possible between :acceoted by the New Yorker barely register a South African context, and there­
'African native talent and European diScipline and technique' (Home and Exile. those that focus on race more or less alternate with those that do not, con­
pp. 13-14). Nkosi would have been thinking in part of Gordimer's friendship that her earliest aspirations were not to define herself as a specifically
with various Drum writers -A World ofStrangers (1958) and Occasion for Loving African writer but rather to set herself on a modernist world stage. Her
(1963) are strongly marked by this association - and of Bloom's co-authorship, show an increasing technical capacity to reconcile aesthetics and poli­
with Todd Matshikiza and others, of the screenplay for the musical King tics, the intensity of the form giving her excellent opportunity to stress the dis­
(see Matshikiza, Chocolates for my Wife, pp.I21-2). Bloom's political involve­ continuities ofwhiteness in its encounter with its other, which appears to have
ment as a defence lawyer also fed into the presented world of his fiction, as an important part ofwhat to her was ' an experience that had scarcely been
did Altman's political activism into hers . at' (Gordimer, Essential Gesture, p. 20) . In many stories, the narrator
Gordimer, Jacobson and Jack Cope were the leading English-language ,cumwnts her black fellows in order to know herself as white, and, sometimes
short-story writers who established themselves in the 1950S. (Altman, Bloom as human. Her stories often give us to understand that the opposite
and Daphne Rooke were primarily novelists and their short-story publication an 'outsider's perspective' is not necessarily or only an 'insider's perspec­
was scant.) Early stories by Gordimer, Jacobson and Cope appeared in tive' but may instead be constituted through a dialectic between outside
of the few local outlets, but mostly in prestigious international magazin~ inside.
such as the New Yorker (Gordimer, Jacobson), Paris Review (Gordimer and As with Gordimer, so Jacobson's South African writing is concerned with
Cope) and Harper's (all three). Gordimer published her first volume of stories, depiction of a world that seemed to him 'never to have been described
Face to Face, in Johannesburg in 1949, and two further short-story volumes all' Oacobson, 'Dan Jacobson Talks to Ian Hamilton', p. 26), and with
this decade, Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952) and Six Feet of the Country (1956), moral implications of racism. His novellas are single-plot stories whose
in London and New York, the former reprinting most of the first volume. flow from a single dramatic incident, underwriting the impression that
Jacobson's twirmed novellas, The Trap (1955) and A Dance in the Sun (1956) , - running back from apartheid to the arrival of the Europeans - is the
were published internationally, as with his stories, which were collected first single most important occurrence feeding into the fiction. More emphatically
in A Long Way from London (1958) and then in The Zulu and the Zeide (1959) than the early Gordimer, Jacobson's early fiction was preoccupied with the
second volume, published in Toronto and New York, mostly repeats the first). of that disastrous intrusion into Africa, and either with the missed
Cope's 1950S stories were collected into The Tame Ox (1960), also published , for its undoing- as in the human connections whites might have
internationally. Paton's magazine publication remained local, although his but did not forge, with blacks - or the small gestures of redemption

390 391
 DOROTHY DRIVER
Short fiction in English

manifesting in the barest and most ironic moments of epiphany, for either the material trials undergone by blacks than with the moral impact of racism
character or the reader. These displaced epiphanies exacerbate the experience white sensibilities.
of rootlessness, dissociation and alienation - whiteness intersecting with a Two further short-story publications fit largely by accident into the 1950S.
Jewish immigrant experience - in which his nt9dernism makes itself most stories in Bertha Goudvis's The Mistress of Mooiplaas and other Stories
strongly felt. were written in the 1940S (see Leveson, 'Bertha Goudvis', p. 63), and
Jacobson's short stories were path-breaking in their sensitive treatment at the end of Goudvis's literary career (her published plays date from
of South African Jews and the ambiguities arising out of the nexus of their 1920S and 1930S, and her novel Little Eden from 1949). They recall Pauline
historical consciousness, their social position and current attitudes. He was not 's quiet interweaving, in the 19IOS and 192os, ofidyllic romance and social
part of the Johannesburg group, but his modernism, like Gordimer's, would Sarah Gertrude Millin's Two Bucks without Hair and other Stories (1957)
have been partly what Nkosi meant when he spoke of'European discipline and comes at virtually the end ofher career. Its stories were mostly published
technique', depending as it did on the wider, cosmopolitan reading habits the London Athenaeum and Adelphi in the 1920S and 1930S, but the two she
intellectual curiosity whose absence among other members of the'civilised' 'Two Spades Deep' and 'Rosie and the Queen's Washerwoman', are
Europeans was a source of amusement and mockery to Nkosi and his Drum motivated by a desire to play with the distance between author, narrator
colleagues (see Nkosi, Home and Exile, pp. 22-3). He left South Africa in text. They nonetheless mark the limit to Millin's ironic self-reflection, a
early 1950S, but continued for a while to set stories in South Africa, specific4ll dependent primarily on her failure to root the characters historically and
in Kimberley in the Northern Cape; he also published two South African "uuulogically. The stories thus put into question the development of a newly
novels that decade (The Price ofDiamonds, 1957, and The Evidence ofLove, stance on whiteness among white English-speaking writers, and
However, he soon dropped the South African setting and then also the the capacity of the 'restless form' of the short-story genre, referred to
story: it was the novel, rather, that became the vehicle for his experiments in to flourish in the stultifying context of apartheid. They also pOint, by
narrative technique and form . His story 'Fresh Fields' (published in to the symbiotic relation of truth-telling and irony in the modernist
in 196r) marks the moment of departure: what seems to have been felt as a relation being affirmedjust at that time by some ofthe black short­
rut of apartheid and anti-apartheid writing is metonymised in 'Fresh writers, who were associated either with Sophiatown in Johannesburg
through the recycling engaged in by two writers, one older, the other younger District Six in Cape Town.
of each other's stale stories.
Cope stood with Gordimer and Jacobson in the 1950S in terms of ,.
reputation, and was an important literary entrepreneur, too, as founding The Sophiatown writers and Drum magazine
tor of Contrast in 1960, but his star aligns now rather more with that of a trick of history, Sophiatown remained exempt from resettlement longer
that once popular and admired but now minor figure. His earliest stories, other black areas. Proclaimed a freehold zone in 1903, it was the old­
either in South Africa (mostly Natal) or its bordering countries, include
of the African townships, close against Johannesburg's city centre, and
handled portrayals of black and white characters in precarious moments to a heterogeneous population: families settled for generations lived
self-awareness or mutual recognition. The apparent ease of the narrative
migrant workers, and Africans mingled with coloureds and Indians
into the consciousness of blacks now seems innocent, and perhaps a sprinkling of white traders in an amalgam of classes from the relatively
the incipient patronisation being unleavened by an ironic self-consciou~u~ to the unemployed (see Hart and Pirie, 'Sight and Soul of Sophia­
This innocence is shared by Rooke's writing, and by Altman's and
Ongoing government repression and increasing poverty in the cities
too, as well as by Dora Taylor'S. Taylor was active in Western Cape already brought into being a variety of oppositional movements, with the
skyite politics and cultural activism from the 1930S to the 1950S, and her Youth League, for instance, rejecting what it saw as the ethic of accom­
stories - written in the 1950S but published long after her death in a
and dialogue of the past, and in other ways, too, older patriarchal
called Don 't Tread on my Dreams (2008) - were more concerned to had been giving way to newer structures consistent with migrant

392
393
 DOROTHY DRIVER Short fiction in English

labour hostel life and the demise ofthe extended family. After the 1954 Natives Natal (taking over from H. 1. E. Dhlomo), Mphahlele had been a secondary
Resettlement Act, Sophiatown was bulldozed, and between 1955 and 1959 its school teacher and Modisane a bookshop employee. In the Cape Town office
African population was relocated mostly to a newly built, segregated township was James Matthews, who also contributed four short stories to Drum; in the
called Meadowlands. By 1963 all the tenants had been evicted, and a suburb for Port Elizabeth office, Jimmy Matyu, who published a single story in New Age
low-income white Afrikaners, called (without irony) 'Triomf, was built in its (February 1957); and in the Durban office G. R. Naidoo, who contributed a
place. The most important literary reflection of Sophiatown's fertile cultural short story in the 1960s.
mix was the journalism and fiction that appeared in Drum magazine, most of Although there was overlap, Drum's political heyday occurred under Samp­
whose leading writers lived in the city. son's editorship, and its literary heyday under Stein's, The fust five years
Drum magazine was established by a three-man directorate in Cape Town in featured essays by Nelson Mandela, Selope Thema and Albert Luthuli among
early 1951 under the title The African Drum. Its early issues mostly represented others, and path-breaking political exposes researched and usually written by
Africans as rural and tribal, but also contained Matshikiza's essays on jazz Nxumalo (Mr Drum '). (Later, under ~he name George Magwaza, Nxumalo
and a remarkable story of the city by Bloke Modisane called 'The Dignity of wrote the column 'Talk 0' the Rand'. ) But political reportage remained bold
Begging' (September 1951). By early 1952, under the advice of black readers even after 1955, covering, for instance, the women's anti-pass campaigns, the
and an advisory committee, the magazine was transformed into a thoroughly formation of the PAC, the increasingly assertive politics of both the PAC
urban production, based in Johannesburg and under the sole proprietorship and the ANC , and the Sophia town and other removals. Sampson initiated the
ofjim Bailey (the son ofa Johannesburg gold-mining magnate). Its circulation annual short-story competitions, and gave fust space to Matshikiza's and Mot­
figures rose from 20,710 in 1951 to 60,024 in 1953 (Bailey, quoted in Manoim. sisi's lively columns; however, it was under Stein, with Mphahlele as fiction
'Black Press', p . 32). Drum was above all a commercial venture. Dominated editor and Themba as assistant editor, that the magazine published its most
advertisements, usually in comic-strip format, it ran tips on beauty, conductl limpressive array of short stories and non-fiction essays, the latter written by
and health, with advice columns and beauty contests, all geared to develop in a story-telling style that prefigured American New Journalism.
middle-class, consumer culture. But the magazine was also a spirited amalgaa Stein left in 1958 after a political disagreement with Bailey, and under
of essays, columns and photographs on politics, boxing and ball sportS, tjopkinson's editorship Drum became a mostly pictorial magazine. In 1961
gangs and jazz, models and housewives, and a monthly short story or two turned Drum into a monthly supplement to his other venture, a popular
brought into its pages virtually all the black writers ofnote. Covering paper called Gol.den City Post (the two publications, now edited by Cecil
leaders, major international visitors and local stars from different sphere~ had for some time shared resources and space; several of the Drum
life , Drum also drew on the Durban-based South African Indian commllI!;1 also wrote for Post). The magazine of later years shares little with
the Cape coloured community, continental Africa and African-AmeriC"~ of the Drum decade. Banned by the South African government
established West and East African editions, its 'media empire' carrying 1965 to 1968, it kept on after 1968 as an autonomous monthly, Naidoo
and forth across the continent images of a new, multicultural black. Durban becoming its fust black editor in 1969. In 1984 Bailey sold it to
identity (see Fleming and Falola, 'Africa's Media Empire', and]. Pers, and all vestige of dissidence disappeared.
'Instant City', p. 485). s contents signalled an affiliation with modernity, not least in the
Drum had four white editors in the 1950S - Bob Crisp (1951-2), English, which - Nakasa later said - assisted in 'the process of elim­
Sampson (1952-5), Sylvester Stein (1956-8) and Tom Hopkinson tribal division with all its unwelcome consequences' (Nakasa, World
and, inJohannesburg, a staff of Africanjournalists and columnists, "f"mh",.,., Nakasa, p. 79). It is in this context that some of the Drum writers
dominating figures were Henry Nxumalo (1951-6), Arthur Maimane claimed not to speak - or feel at home in - any African lan­
Matshikiza (late 1951-60), Can Themba (1953-9), Casey Motsisi (1954-62; researchers mention Themba, Motsisi, Maimane and even Modisane
7), Modisane (1955-9), Mphahlele (1955-7), Nkosi (1956-61) and Nat 'Drum Magazine', pp. 109, II3; Van Dyk, 'Short Story Writing', pp. 62,
(1958-9). Most of them had had a mission education, and several a Fort Good-looking Corpse, pp. 179, 341; see also Nakasa, World, p. 77).
University degree; Nxumalo had written for Bantu World, Nkosi for the history of Drum through the 1950S has to do with the creation not

' 194 >0<

 DOROTHY DRIVER Short fiction in English

only of a black South African writing but also of a black South African to be lacking in white South Africans and a moral universe felt to be
public. A close study of its circulation figures suggests that its major to current African experience than to the culturally thin and morally
was political reportage, with its urban audience having 'more in comrnoQ pnpr""ted one the black writers found in white South Africa. Themba's 'Mob
with readers of working-class and radical papers in Britain in the last , (April 1953) is surely in part designed to demonstrate to bewildered
than with those of the Daily Mirror in ours' (Rabkin, 'Drum Magazine', p. how extensively he can quote the Bard. At the same time, his photo-
even while Bailey and Sampson continued to include pin-ups, sex and story 'Baby come Duze' (April 1956) shows off his facility with tsotsitaal
Still, at a time when Bantu World was dropping virtually all its literary township street argot, mixing several languages) and serves as a reminder
(reviews, literary news) (Maake, 'Publishing and Perishing', p. 152), Drum Africanness that was at the same time being produced.
encouraging imaginative writing, its first competition in 1953 attracting over The modern urban individual depicted in Drum is informed by a multi­
thousand entrants (perhaps in part for the considerable £50 prize), even if of cultural contexts, including not just the life of the streets (itself
short stories themselves were not read widely by black readers, as is rrned by the Hollywood B-movies from which the young gangsters took
times claimed (Rive, 'Interview', p. 52). Yet it was in response to the lead), but also a range of reading: notably, British and American detec­
Education Act (with its reduced education, and reduced teaching of fiction (Peter Cheyney and Damon Runyon) and the Harlem Renaissance
that Hopkinson so radically transformed Drum, more or less submitting to Wright, Willard Motley). The latter, which reassessed the American
competition with Zonk, a mass-market English-language pictorial through the lens ofan enforced marginality, helped the Drum writers to
founded in 1950 that focused entirely on entertairunent and ran brief themselves as 'iconoclastic, independent, and ineradicably cosmopoli­
stories only occaSionally. (Nixon, 'Harlem, Hollywood and the Sophiatown Renaissance', p. 16).
The Drum writers responded with wit to apartheid legislation. At a was South Africa's Greenwich Village. There, Nakasa said, 'you
when beaches were being segregated, Drum photographed Dolly Rameocs more likely to walk into a conversation centred around james joyce or
posing in her bikini on a mine dump; at a time when blacks were excluded! Osborne or Langston Hughes instead oflocal names like Gertrude Millin
from parliamentary representation, Drum ran its own 'Drum Parliament'; Olive Schreiner' (Nakasa, World ofNat Nakasa , p. 80). Modisane's 'The Dig­
a time when education was being limited, Drum ran its own 'Drum of Begging' is indebted to American modernism in its anti-heroic, even
Quiz', offering to its readers an informal, mostly political, education; at a guise; his character Nathaniel or Nathan is but one gesture made to
when theatres were for whites only, township street life and the shebeem 'N"tbn"el West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which appeared in its first British edition
were rendered as dramatic as the stage (in real life, a frequently
Occurrence is about tsotsis - gangsters - forcing their victims to recite Drum fiction was markedly mixed in genre and subject matter. Paton's Cry,
speare). Through Drum the African journalists made johannesburg their Beloved Country and Peter Abrahams's Wild Conquest and Tell Freedom were
indeed, tried to make the world their own in contradiction to exclusive in Drum's early years; some of the other fiction consisted of stories
ownership. the annual prize winners and runners-up (judged by figures as various as
Nkosi argued that when his generation repudiated the kind ofhero Abrahams, Gordimer,jordan Ngubane, R. R. R. Dhlomo and Langston
in Paton' s emollient African character Kumalo and cast about for with a handful ofstories from outside the country. In the early years,
heroes, they seized upon the 'cacophonous, swaggering world symbolic and educative short narratives of the African oral tradition were
England (as] the closest parallel to our own mode of existence' (Home ;aenected through mission influence into moral tales about the adverse effects
Exile, p. 18). 'The world of Shakespeare reaches out a fraternal hand to urban life on rural innocents, in much the manner ofR. R. R. Dhlomo. Many
throbbing heart of Africa', added Themba (,Through Shakespeare's reached for a novelistic range rather than the concentration typical
p . 15 0 ). The creative use of Shakespearean allusions articulates 'a complex the modern short story, while others took the form ~f sketches whose
resistance to the notion of the "native" as less "civilized'" (Distiller, manner spoke to the inappropriateness of developing a narrative
African Shakespeare', p. 26; see also johnson, Shakespeare and South 'fugitive' a culture (Mphahlele's term, quoted in Anwell, Rewriting
pp. 173-6); such resistance, moreover, self-consciously partakes ofthe p. 24) . Motsisi's monthly columns - 'If Bugs were Men' (February

396 397
 DOROTHY DRIVER Short fiction in English

1958) and others in the 'Bugs' series, with their jokes about bloodsucking collections of the writing of some of its key figures also help keep the Drum
and consanguinity, along with 'On the Beat' - offered brief episodes: a life myth alive, although the particular writers are represented by pieces published
lived in snatches. Maimane's detective series, running monthly through 1953 elsewhere toO.6
under the Americanised pseudonym J. Arthur Mogale (part of his name), In some critical accounts, the musical King Kong rather than the magazine
provided a comic, ironic treatment of police corruption and criminal power in is named as the 'ultimate achievement and final flowering' of Sophiatown's
'hard-boiled' style. Themba's stories, also using Americanised nominalisation cultural enterprise (Coplan, In Township Tonight!, p. 175) for it represents a
(D. Can Themba), were '''yellow press" situations ... pushed toward serious urban African aesthetic forged out of a complex cultural interaction that
confrontation' (Chapman, 'Drum' Decade, p. 208), depicting a world in which only reached for. In other accounts, the short-story writers themselves
morality, family feeling, honesty and love struggled to survive in an urban the achievers. Mphahlele, Modisane and Nkosi are seen as the young
order corrupt at its core, and where horizontal violence (it was occaSionally intellectuals of the New African movement, the culmination of a line
hinted) substituted for political revolt. Mphahlele's stories made a similar running from H. 1. E. Dhlomo through Peter Abrahams, drawing into Africa
suggestion, but they are otherwise very different, mostly sketching a Newclare the poetics of the Harlem Renaissance and giving to the period the name
community (part of greater Sophia town) that incorporated a traditional, rural 'Sophiatown Renaissance? But Themba is by general agreement the iconic
ethos into its urban fabric. Mphahlele thus contradicted the image propagated Drum figure, partly on account of his strong identification with the city, and
by the government presses of a rural world with nothing to offer modernity, specifically with she been and outlaw culture. Nkosi called him 'the supreme
and he portrayed continuity between the urban and rural rather than the intellectual tsotsi' (Nkosi in Themba, Will to Die, p. x). His insouciance is taken
rupture depicted elsewhere in Drum. His stories also treated the changed as Drum style. Themba is also used, specifically in Chapman's anthology, to
position of women in the city in a less fraught way than did some of the other foreground the heterogeneric quality of the Drum story (Chapman includes
Drum pieces. fiction and columns, plus Themba's comic-strip story).
Drum has been remembered through a considerable literary infrastruc­ Drum style is characterised, then, in part by the bravado with which the
ture of marketable accounts, including editors' memoirs,' anthologies com­ writers voiced their refusal to submit to the versions of blackness (both rural
bined with commentary,2 and collections of photographs, interviews and and urban) being delivered by apartheid, and in part by linguistic and generic
reminiscences,3 and it has continued to be kept alive through theatre, film and The magazine has been credited with producing an African
nostalgic media references. It is also the subject of numerous book chapters English in the making, inflected variously by a creative colloquialism and a
and journal articles,4 academic theses and university courses. Whilst Drum tll1t5itaal, along with a vocabulary of erudition and literary allusion, as well
fiction only occaSionally makes it to the more general anthology selections,S inventive neolOgisms and vigorous syntactical structures that commenta­
have associated with jazz: 'Matshikese', Drum called it, after Matshik­
I Sampson, Drum: The Making of a Magazine (slightly revised from Drum: A Venture into tht monthly jazz columns (see Titlestad, 'Jazz Discourse and Black South
New Afiica); Hopkinson, In the Fiery Continent; Hopkinson, Under the Tropic ; see also Stein's
Second-Class Taxi and Who KiUed Mr Drum~ Modernity'). The deSCriptions of Sophiatown gave expression to an
2 Chapman's The 'Drum ' Decade includes an essay, 'More than Telling a Story', pp. 183-232, and carnivalesque urban experience and what is generally called a 'shebeen
a select bibliography at pp. 233-8; Nicol, A Good-looking Corpse, has interspersed commentary.
3 For example, Stein andJacobson, SophiatoWII Speaks; Schadeberg, with Gosani et al., The
camaraderie' a that belied the incessant fracturing of communal existence at a
People; Naidoo, The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s. of increasingly repressive and brutal apartheid legislation. In the face of a
4 A sample list would include Addison, 'Drum Beat'; Barnett, A Vision ofOrdd ; Choonoo, 'The
Sophiatown Generation' ; Clowes, 'Masculiniry, Matrimony and Generation'; Driver, 'DT1U!I 6 These include Motsisi, Casey & Co.; Nakasa, The World ofNat Nakasa; and Themba, The World
(1951--9) and the Spatial Configurations of Gender'; Fenwick, "'Tough guy, eh?'''; Gready, 'The ojCan Themba and The Will to Die.
Sophiatown Writers of the 1950S'; Hannerz, 'Sophiatown'; Helgesson , 'Shifring Fields'; Maughan Visser, 'South Africa: The Renaissance that Failed'; Nixon, 'Harlem, Hollywood and the
Brown, "'The Anthology as Reliquary?"'; Mzamane , 'An Unhistorical Will into Past Time.~' t ~ophiatown Renaissance' ; see also Masilela's infonnative website, 'New African Movement'
Ndebele, 'The Ethics oflntellecrual Combat'; Nixon , 'Harlem, Hollywood and the Sophiatown on 'Sophia town Renaissance 1952-1960': hnp: llpzacad.pitzer.edu I NAM I sophia I
Renaissance ' . See also Woodson, Drum: An Index. sr.shtml
5 For example, Raising the Blinds: A Century of South Afiican Women's Stories included one The term is a favoured one, used for example by Adey et al ., Companion to South Afiican
three South African stories Drum published under female signarure, although these appear Literature, p. 188; Cornwell et al., Columbia Guide to South Afiican Literature in English, p. 87; and
have been written by men (see Driver, 'Drum', pp. 236, 241 n. 12). Chapman, Drum, p. 221.

398 399
 DOROTHY DRIVER Short fiction in English

tendency to sentimentalise Drum, we need to recall its images of urban horror: Sophiatown counterpart, the District Six group was disparate - intellectually,
a 'hit and run mislife' , as Themba's story 'Marta' puts it Guly 1956), whose politically and in class terms - but the writers were linked through friendship,
most frequent expression is either domestic or township violence (Themba, a shared interest in writing (Rive and De Vries, 'Interview', pp. 45-6), and
'Mob Passion', April 1953) or African-Indian warfare Gordan Ngubane, 'Man in some cases political activism. But for 'Willie-Boy!' (Drum [April 1956), a
of Africa', August 1956; Mphahlele, 'Lesane', February 1957), or a complex' cry three-hander by Rive, Matthews and Clarke, the magazine was incidental to
of fear, of hurt, of sorrow and of all the bitter memories stored in a suffering their connection. Not only did they publish other short stories elsewhere ­
heart' (Mbokotwane Manqupu, 'Love Comes Deadly', january 1955). Rive in New Age (September 1955) and Fighting Talk (December 1955, january
Whilst Drum should probably be thought of as an encouragement to the 1956 and january 1957); La Guma in Fighting Talk (October 1956), New Age
Sophiatown writers, their subsequent publications do not always reflect well Oanuary 1957) and Africa South (p [1958); Matthews in Africa South (p [1958) ­
on the magazine. Modisane revised 'The Dignity ofBeggmg' for republication but they were also more overtly political than the Sophiatown group, and
in Peggy Rutherford's Darkness and Light in such a way as to draw further seen as chiefly responSible for sustaining the protest tradition in black South
attention to the constructed, artful nature of his tale and its deep satire; African fiction .
Nakasa's weekly columns in the Rand Daily Mail were, for Gordimer, 'the best In the Western Cape, where the racial atmosphere had in the past been
writing he did' (Gordimer, Essential Gesture, p. 70); and by far Themba's most relatively relaxed, a new militancy had already started expressing itself
intricate short story, 'The Suit' , was published not in Drum but in The Classic. through the Non-European Unity Movement, the major political force among
La Guma's 'Battle for Honour' was, he said, ruined by Drum (La Guma in coloured intellectuals (see Lodge, Black Politics; Alexander, 'Aspects of Non­
Abrahams, Memories of Home, p. 19), and he published a different version in Collaboration in the Western Cape', pp. 183-4). Opposition politics became

The New African.

increasingly fraught after the Communist Party was forced to disband in 1950

The story of Drum should not inhibit a fuller look at the rise and fall of the
and as increaSingly harsh apartheid laws and practices took root, many of
black short story in other magazines of the day.9 Of the Sophiatown writers, which created or exacerbated hierarchical distinctions among those desig­
only Maimane and Mphahlele published elsewhere during the 1950S, Maimane nated 'non-European'. La Guma, the major writer in this group, and the most
in Africa South (2:3 [1958]), and Mphahlele in Purple Renoster (2 [1957]), Blade deeply politically engaged, had been an active member of the Young Com­
Orpheus (4 [1958]), and (under the pseudonym Bruno Esekie) in Standpunte munist League. He subsequently joined the South African Coloured People's
(8:4 [1954]), Fighting Talk Gune 1955) and Africa South (2:2 [1958]). Most of the Organisation, and between 1956 and 1960 was a defendant in the notorious
others contributed stories to other magazines, but had to stop in the 19605
Treason Trials; he was acquitted, finally, with the other accused, but spent
when censorship kicked in. the next years in and out of prison.

La Guma's writing, like Rive's and Matthews's, was centred on District Six .
The area received its name as the last of the six municipal districts created
The District Six writers in and around Cape Town in 1867. Although it was mostly a working-class
Among the writers published in Drum were some of those associated with coloured community, its proximity to the city and docks in addition to its
the District Six quarter in Cape Town either by birth and residence (Rive, multinational origins gave it a multiracial, multiclass and cosmopolitan atmo­
La Guma) or place of work (Matthews) or association (Peter Clarke). A1f sphere, for it was home to numerous Indians and Chinese, some whites and
Wannenburgh was a close associate of the group; he published short stories those few Africans who had pennits to be there, or else lived as illegals, and it
in the 1960s, not in Drum but in Black Orpheus and The New African also attracted those who wanted to share in its political activism and night life
classification as white is one of the many ambiguities of apartheid). Like its (sex and jazZ).lO For Rive, District Six 'cultivated a sharp, urban inclusivity,

9 Local independent magazines that ran one or more stories by black writers in the 1950S and 10 See Bickford-Smith. 'The Origins and Early History of District Six'. p. 37. The Africans who
early 1960s were (with magazine start dates included) Fightillg Talk (1946), Stalldpunte (1952 ) , New continued to live in District Six occupied what was known as 'The Building', according to
Age (1954), Africa South (1956), The Purple Renoster (1956), Contrast (1961), The New African (1961.). Fortune. The House ill Tytte Street, p . 100. See Ngcelwane, Sala Kahle District Six, for an account
of the removal of an African family from District Six in the 1960s.
The Classic (1963).

400
4 0 1

 DOROTHY DRIVER
Short fiction in English

the type which cockneys have in the East End of London and black Ameri­ was not redeveloped. Like Sophiatown, District Six has been celebrated in
cans in Harlem' (Rive, 'District Six', p. 112), and his writing, like that of the South African cultural memory as the kind of community that might have
others, was concerned with what it meant to be classified as coloured urIde.r persisted, and spread, had it not been for apartheid's atomisation (see, for
apartheid, exploring the varieties of racism (white racism, African racism example, Willemse, More than Brothers). With the classification of coloureds
towards coloureds, and colour consciousness among coloureds) both within into five subsections urIder the Population Registration Act, one memoirist
and beyond the community. Their realist and often naturalist tales the members of her extended family were resettled in five different
characters struggling more or less weakly against the world of poverty, dis­ townships (Hettie Adams, in Adams and SUttIler, William Street District Six,
crimination and crime into which destiny has driven them. Sympathy is often pp.55-6).
focused on women. In most of the stories, squalid conditions take on a life of The District Six writers produced a new body of writing, the first stories
their own, often stressing what was a strong theme in Drum as well, that the of their place. The coloured population, which accounted for well over half
skollie (the Cape version of the tsotsi) is made and not born. city's total, had hitherto spawned only one notable literary figure, the
La Guma was employed as a journalist on New Age from 1955, which meant Alnkaans writer Adam Small. But Cape culture did not spring from nowhere. It
that, unlike the Drum writers, he wrote for a magazine whose editorial policy tapped into a long-standing musical and performance tradition: dance bands,
was consonant with his political beliefs. (Alfred Hutchinson, a fellow Treason and particularly the ironic, mocking and self-mocking posturing of
Trialist, also published short stories in New Age.) La Guma's major journalistic New Year carnival parades, with their ghoemaliedjies (a blend of Dutch
project was to report on District Six, and his columns ('Up my Alley') fed Indonesian folk-songs) and blackface minstrel performances (adapted
into his stories, which were centred on slum-dwellers and petty gangsters African America), two forms in which satire and masquerade combined
who acted through necessity rather than choice, and some ofwhom he repre­ Winberg, 'Satire, Slavery', p. 93). Although the short stories sometimes
sented as figures of morality, sensitivity and honour. Of the novella A Walk in on characters exploiting a tension between the reality produced urIder
~ ~artheid and an alternative way ofbeing, and sometimes refer to the carnival
the Night (1962), largely completed during the 1950S, La Guma said he had tried
to depict 'a people struggling ... to see something new, other than their expe­ elements of it, the carnival cannot on the whole be said to define District
riences in this confined community' (La Guma in Abrahams, Alex La Cuma, style. This leads us to consider a distinction between it and at least some
p. 49) , and his short stories, too, treat the possibility of political or intellectual the Sophia town writing. Nowhere in the District Six short stories does one
awakening, though this is usually given over to the reader. His stories are ,wstinguish the kind of modernist instability opened up in Modisane's writing,
structurally as sophisticated as those of any other writer of the 1950S, and to a lesser extent in Maimane's, through their self-conscious play with the
his dialogue meets Themba's for deftness, not least in its use of Kaaps (Cape tion between the represented and the real; nor can they be characterised
coloured vernacular, often mixing English and Afrikaans). He also producedin the same self-consciously aestheticised, experimental manner sometimes
New Age a remarkable comic strip, 'Little Libby: The Adventures of Liberation rassociated with Drum. On the other hand, a different kind of irony, as well
Chabalala', published in weekly instalments through much of 1959, thus for expressionist elements, connects La Guma's short stories to Mphalliele's:
a moment making New Age a little more like Drum (see Field, Alex La Cuma, realism expands well beyond the merely representational, and they both
p. 92); this has been reprinted, along with La Guma's other pieces in New Age, themselves within a stable vernacular culture, which gives them their
in A. Odendaal and R. Field's, Liberation Chabalala (1993)· stature as writers. However, on yet another hand, La Guma's generic
Proclamations for resettlement urIder the Group Areas Act started in 1957. expanded the range of the vernacular through reference to the
and by 1965 over 30,000 coloured people had been shifted to the Cape Flats, powers ofpopular culture, notably in the 'Little Libby' comic strip; and
radically reducing the number of those with a muniCipal vote (see PiImock, his sketches in the New Age columns, fact masquerades absurdly as fiction,
'Ideology and Urban Planning', p. 163). (In all, 60,000 people were removed a way which recalls (and extends the ambit of) Drum's experimentalism.
from District Six; see Bickford-Smith et al., Cape Town in the Twentieth Century,
p. 183.) In 1966 District Six was officially proclaimed white. It was bulldozed. a literary period, the 1950S came to an untidy end. Apartheid drove several
in 1980, but, urIlike Sophia town, massive public outcry meant that the the Sophia town writers into exile in the late 1950S or early 1960s - Maimane,

403
402
 DOROTHY DRIVER Short fiction in English

Modisane, Mphahlele, Nakasa, Nkosi and Themba - and some of the white proSCribed or difficult, writers, publishers and readers being intimidated, even
writers: Altman, Bloom, Cope, Jacobson, Rooke and, later, Taylor (see llsometimes unconsciously, into habits of literary caution.
Chapter 20). Apartheid may also be blamed for driving two to an early death, Bringing together the Sophiatown and District Six writers, and then these
Nakasa in 1965, Themba in 1968. La GuI"!¥. had already been banned under together with white writers, tempts one to reconsider the period through the
the Suppression of Communism Act, and in 1966 an amendment to the act reputation and career of two women writers marginal to the larger group:
was used to ban a further group, including six of the Sophiatown set: Mat­ K. Jeffreys, a Cape writer who wrote at the end of the decade a set of
shikiza, Modisane, Mphahlele, Nakasa, Nkosi and Themba. T he District Six l-breaking essays for Drum, and also some poems, about racial passing and
writers' careers continued through the 1960s and beyond. Clarke, who pub­ cultural interaction; and Bessie Head, who lived for a short time in District Six
lished only one more story (in The New African), went on to become a graphic was loosely associated with Drum by virtue ofworking in first Cape Town
artist. Matthews, who would later found and run a Cape Town publish­ then Johannesburg for Golden City Post as a journalist and columnist.
ing house, was banned several times but established himself internationally Jeffreys has had to wait until this century to be 'discovered'; and Head was
through short stories and poetry. Rive, armed with a university degree, had a able to begin publishing (initially mostly in Africa South) only after she had
successful career as an academic, editor and writer until his death aged 58. the country (see also Chapter 20). Writing of Drum and Post first in The
Some of the black writers continued to publish stories locally, sometimes Cardinals and then, briefly, in A Question ofPower, Head strove in Botswana to
under pseudonym: in The Classic, which Nakasa founded and edited from the racial and gender constraints she had experienced as a journalist
1963 (Themba, Motsisi, Mphahlele, Nkosi and Rive), Fighting Talk (Maimane, aspirant fiction writer, and to make the connections with African village
Nkosi), and Contrast (Nkosi, Rive). Themba's remarkable story 'The Urchin' life that had been either lost or unavailable to those Drum writers so carefully
went into Drum in April 1963." International journals were also hospitable­ their distance from white constructions of tribalism.
Africa South in Exile (La Guma, Themba and Mphahlele), Transition (Rive, Whereas Drum - its white editors and black journalists, but also the very
Maimane, Matthews and Nkosi), Presence Africaine (Nkosi and Matthews), The context it sprang from and represented - arguably failed women writers, it
New African (La Guma, Nkosi), Frontier (Nkosi) and Negro Digest (Rive). La concretise a historical moment through and against which black South
Gurna also published, in Portuguese translation only, a story in the Brazil­ writers and readers would define and redefine themselves. The black
ian journal Cadernos Brasileiros. Mphahlele, co-editing Black Orpheus, took five of the 1950S carries within it the promise of a literature that might
stories from La Gurna, and single stories from Mairnane, Modisane and him· developed differently had it not been for the limiting aspects of Bantu
self. He also played a leading role in the Mbari Publishing House (Nigeria), the censorships and bannings, and the other apartheid repressions .
developing a Pan-African list and helping launch La Gurna on his international Nkosi put it, 'the fifties .. . finally spelled out the end of one kind. of South
career. Besides becoming a major literary critic and producing some poems, and foreshadowed the beginning of another' (Home and Exile, p. 6).
libretti and remarkable short stories, Nkosi established himself as a literary !UlLlUUillg the white writing too, the literature of the decade hangs heavy with
editor in the 1960s (editing The New African), also becoming a dramatist and , carrying like a massive hinge the weight of the half-century past and
novelist of note. Rive produced his first short-story volume, African Songs
(1963), and edited Quartet (1963), which contained four stories each by him­
self, La Guma, Matthews and Wannenburgh, dedicating it to Mphahlele 'in Bibliography
admiration and regard for his work for literature' on the African continent of srories published in magazines are given in the text.
as well as in South Africa. But, like the memoirs so many of them would :ADrahamS, C. A. Alex La Guma, Boston: Twayne, 19 85.
write in the 1960s, their short stories became close to non-existent for the ~brahams, C. A. (ed.). Memories ofHome: The Writings ofAlex La Guma , Trenton, N]: Afiica
World Press, 199L
next generation. AntholOgies published in or marketed for South Africa had
H , and H. Sunner. William Street District Six, Diep River: Chameleon Press, 1988 .
to exclude many of them; moreover, local magazine publication was either
G. 'Dnun Beat: An Examination of Drum', Speak 1:4 (1978), 4-8.
, D., R. Beeton, M. Chapman and E. Pereira (comps.). Companion to South African
II This was not published in The Classic, despite what various sources say. English Literature, Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1986.

404 405
 DOROTHY DRIVER Short fiction ill English

Alexander, N. 'Aspects ofNon-Collaboration in the Western Cape,1943-1963', SocialDynam­ Gray, S. 'A Tale Larger than the Sum of its Parts: Herman Charles Bosman' s use of Short
ics I2:1 (1986), 1-14. Fictional Forms', Matatu 3:5 (1989), 1-10.
Alexander, P. F. Alan Paton: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1994. Gready, P. 'The Sophiatown Writers of the 1950S - the Unreal Reality of Their World',
Attwell, D. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History, Pietermar­ Journal ofSouthern African Studies 16:1 (1990), 139-64.
itzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 206'5. Hannerz, U . 'Sophiatown - the View from Mar', Journal of Southern African Studies 20:2
Barnett, U. A. A Vision ofOrder: A Study ofBlack South African Literature in English (194-1980), (1994), 181---93·
Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1983. Hart, D . M., and G. H. Pirie. 'The Sight and Soul of Sophiatown', Geographical Review 74
Bickford-Smith, V. 'The Origins and Early History of District Six', in S. Jeppie and C. (1984), 38-47.
Soudien (eds.), The Struggle for Distria Six: Past and Present, Cape Town: Buchu, 1990, Head, B. The Cardinals with Meditations and Short Stories, ed. M. J. Daymond, Cape Town:
35-43· David Philip, 1993.
Bickford-Smith, V., E. van Heyningen and N. Worden. Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: A Question ofPower, London: Davis-Poynter, 1973­
An fllustrated Social History, Cape Town: David Philip, 1999. Helgesson, S. 'Shifring Fields: Imagining Literary Renewal in Itinmirio and Drum' , Research
Chapman, M. (ed.). The 'Drum' Decade: Stories from the 1950S, Pietermaritzburg: University in African Literatures 38 :2 (2007), 206-26.
of Natal Press, 1989. Hopkinson, T. In the Fiery Continent, London: Victor Gollancz, 1962.
Southern African Literatures, London and New York: Longman, 1996. Under the TropiC, London: Hutchinson, 1984.
Choonoo, R. N. 'The Sophiatown Generation: Black Literary Journalism during the 1950S', Jacobson, D. A Dance in the Sun, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956.
in L. Switzer (ed.), South Africa'S Alternative Press: Voices of Protest and Resistance, 'Dan Jacobson Talks to Ian Hamilton' , New Review 4:43 (October 1977), 25---9.
1880s-1960s, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 252-65. The Evidence ofLove, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960.
Clowes, L. 'Masculinity, Matrimony and Generation: Reconfiguring Patriarchy in DTlIm ALong Way from London, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1958.
1951-1983' ,Journal ofSouthern African Studies 34:1 (2008), 179-92. The Price ofDiamonds, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1958.
Cope, J. The Tame Ox, London: William Heinemann, 1960. The Trap, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955.
Coplan, D . In Township Tonight!, London: Longman, 1985. The Zulu and the Zeide, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959.
Cornwell, G., et al. Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945, New York: Jeppie, S., and C. Soudien (eds.). The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present, Cape Town:
Columbia University Press, 2010. Buchu, 1990.
Distiller, N. 'South African Shakespeare: a Model for Understanding Cultural Transforma­ Johnson, D. Shakespeare and South Africa, Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
tion?', Shakespeare in Southern Africa 15 (2003), 21-7. La Guma, A. A Walk in the Night, fbadan: Mbari, 1962.
Driver, D. 'Drum (1951-1959) and the Spatial Configurations ofGender', in K. Darian-Smith, Leveson, M. 'Bertha Goudvis: Time, Memory and Freedom', in C. Clayton (ed. ), Women
L. Gunner and S. Nuttall (eds.), Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South and Writing in South Africa: A Critical Anthology, Marshalltown: Heinemann, 1989,
Africa and Australia, London: Routledge, 1996, 227-38. 61-71.
Fenwick, M. '''Tough guy, eh?": The Gangster-Figure in Drum' ,Journal ofSouthern African Lodge, T. Black Politics in South Africa since 1945, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983.
Studies 22:4 (1996), 617-32. Lukacs, G. The Meaning ofContemporary Realism, trans.]' and N. Mander, London: Merlin,
Field, R. A lex La Guma: A Literary & Political Biography, Auckland Park: Jacana, 2010. 1962.
Fleming, T., and T . Falola. 'Africa's Media Empire: Drum's Expansion to Nigeria', History Studies in European Realism, trans. E. Bone, London: Hillway, 1950.
in Africa 32 (2005), 133-64· Maake, N . 'Publishing and Perishing: Books, People and Reading in African Languages
Fortune, L. The House in Tyne Street: Childhood Memories of District Six, Cape Town: Kwela in South Africa', in N. Evans and M. Seeber (eds.), The Politics of Publishing in South
Books, 1996. Africa, London: Holger Ehling Publishing and Scottsville: University of Natal Press,
Gordimer, N . The Essential Gesture: Writing. Politics and Places, ed. S. Clingman, Johannes­ 2000, 127-62.
burg: Taurus and Cape Town: David Philip, 1988. Manoim, I. S. 'The Black Press (1945-1963): The Growth of the Black Mass Media and
'The Flash of Fireflies' [1968], in C. E. May (ed. ), Short Story Theories, Athens: Ohio their Role as Ideological Disseminators', MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand,
University Press, 1976, 178-81. 1983·
Occasion for Loving, London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. Masilela, N. 'Sophia town Renaissance 1952-1960', in 'New African Movement', http://
A World ofStrangers , London: Victor Gollancz, 1958. pzacad.pitzer.edu / NAM / sophia / writers / sr.shtrnl, accessed 30 January 2010.
Goudvis, B. Little Eden [A novel], Cape Town: Central News Agency, 1949. Matshik:iza, J. 'Instant City', Public Culture 16:3 (2004), 481---97.
The Mistress ofMooiplaas and other Stories, Cape Town: Central News Agency, 1956. Matshik:iza, T. Chocolates for my Wife [1961], Cape Town: David Philip, 1982.

406 407
 DOROTHY DRIVER Short fiction in English

Maughan Brown, D. "'The Anthology as Reliquary?": Ten Years of Staffrider and the Drum. Taylor, D. Don't Tread on my Dreams, Johannesburg: Penguin, 2008.
Decade', Current Writing n (1989), 3-2I. Themba, C. 'Through Shakespeare's Africa', New African 2:8 (1963), 150-3.
Millin, S. G. Two Bucks without Hair and other Stories, Cape Town: Central News Agency, The Will to Die [1972], Cape Town: David Philip, 1982.
1957· The World ofCan Themba, ed. E. Patel [1985J, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990.
Motsisi, C. Casey & Co.: Selected Writings ofCasey 'Kid' Motsisi, ed. M. Mutloatse,Johannes­ M. 'Jazz Discourse and Black South African Modernity, with Special Reference
burg: Ravan, 1978. to "Matshikese"', American EthnolOgist 32:2 (2005), 210-21.
Mphahlele, E. The Afiican Image, London: Faber, 1962. Dyk, B. 'Short Stoty Writing in Drum Magazine, 1951-61: A Critical Appraisal', MA
Down Second Avenue [1959J, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978. thesis, University of Natal, 1988.
Man must Live and other Stories, Cape Town: African Bookman, 1946. ,N. W. 'South Africa: The Renaissance that Failed' ,Journal ofCommonwealth Literature
Mzamane, M. 'An Unhistorical Will into Past Times', Current Writing 1:1 (1981), 36-40. 9:1 (1976), 42-57.
Naidoo, R. The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts, 2008. N. Miss Lonelyhearts [1933J, London: Livewright, 1949.
Nakasa, N. The World ofNat Nakasa, ed. E. Patel, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1975. Wi1Ie.mse, H. (ed.). More than Brothers: Peter Clarke & James Matthews at 70, Cape Town:
Ndebele, N. 'The Ethics ofIntellectual Combat', Current Writing 1:1 (1989), 23-35. Kwela Books, 2000.
Ngcelwane, N. Sala Kahle District Six: An African Woman's Perspective, Cape Town: Kwela C. 'Satire, Slavery and the Ghoemaliedjies of the Cape Muslims', New Contrast 19:4
Books, 1998. (1992), 78-9 6.
Nicol, M. A Good-looking Corpse, London: Secker & Warburg, 1991. D. C. Drum: An Index to 'Africa'S LeadingMagazine', 1951-1965, Madison: University
Nixon, R. 'Harlem, Hollywood and the Sophia town Renaissance', Homelands, Harlem and of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Hollywood , London and New York.: Routledge, 1994, 1I-41.
Nkosi, L. Home and Exile and Other Selections, London and New York.: Longman, 1983.
Odendaal, A., and R. Field (eds.). Liberation Chabalala: The World ofAlex La Guma, Bellville:
Mayibuye Books, 1993.
Paton, A. Cry, the Beloved Country, London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.
Tales from a Troubled lAnd, New York.: Scribner, 1961; reprinted as Debbie Go Home,
London: Jonathan Cape, 1961.
Pinnock, D. 'Ideology and Urban Planning: Blueprints of a Garrison City', in W. G. James
and M. Simons (eds.), The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History ofthe Western Cape,
Cape Town: David Philip, 1989, 150-68.
Rabkin, D. 'Drum Magazine (1951-1961): and the Works of Black South African Writers
Associated with it', Ph.D. thesis, UniverSity of Leeds, 1975.
Rive, R. 'District Six: Fact and Fiction', in S.Jeppie and C. Soudien (eds.), The Strugglefor
District Six: Past and Present, Cape Town: Buchu, 1990, 1I0-16.
Rive, R., and A. H. de Vries. 'An Interview with Richard Rive', Current Writing 1:1 (1989).
45-55·
S., H. V. L. Review of The Dream and the Desert by U. Krige, The Lying Days by N. Gordimer.
and A Time to lAugh by L. Thompson, African Affairs 53:2II (1954), 173-4.
Sampson, A. Drum: The Making ofaMagazine[19s6J,Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan
Ball, 2004·
Schadeberg,J., B. Gosani et al. The Fifties People ofSouth Africa,Johannesburg: Bailey's Photo
Archives, 1987.
Sieben, G. ' ''A More Sophisticated Bosman"', in S. Gray (ed.), Herman Charles
Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1986.
Stein, P., and R. Jacobson (eds.). Sophiatown Speaks, Johannesburg: Berrrams Avenue
1986.
Stein, S. Second-Class Taxi, London: Faber, 1958.
Who Killed Mr Drumr, Johannesburg: Mayibuye Books, 1999.

408 409