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Inventing Africa in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Imagination, Politics and Transnationalism in Drum Magazine

The magazine known today as Drum was launched in Cape Town, South Africa, in March 1951, as The African Drum, but it later relocated to Johannesburg where it rebranded itself and became a media and cultural icon in later years. Drum was originally aimed specifically at black African readers although for a number of years it also attracted readership across the racial divide in the country and elsewhere in the world. The African Drum initially pitched the tone of its articles and editorials at what it deemed an African subject who, the publishers seemed to assume, lived at the confluence of both the traditional world – easily taken to stand for a rural tribal life or the “great illiterate, primitive mass” of Africans according to one of Drum’s early editors, Anthony Sampson (1956 : 114) – and a new westernised ‘modern’ world – by which the publishers implied a European influenced urban life.