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Ideology and the crisis of affiliation and association in the professional life and career of the Drum School writer, Can Themba (1924–1968)

ABSTRACT This article sketches a background of some 10 years of ‘Drum School’ history in the former black freehold township of Sophiatown, Johannesburg. By the term ‘Drum School’, I refer to a group of South African writers who worked under the aegis of the African magazine Drum, during that period of South African history which has come deservedly to be known as the Fifties. One of the arguments largely commented on in the popular discourse about this group of African writers is that their worth to South African society and institutions can be judged by the professional skills and qualifications they had as members of the educated African upper class: the writers represented a new class, a middle class – so the argument runs – which emerged to take its rightful place in the mainstream paradigm of the dominant culture of South African society, providing the strongest example for Africans’ transition to western culture and civilisation. The Drum School history is also approached as a topic of ideological history. The continuing interest in the writers comes from their importance for South African society as the chief exponents of the Christian humanistic tradition of the Church, which constituted a development of missionary ideas from the middle of the nineteenth century. Part of the problem with the ideological school of the Drum School history, it will be argued in the article, is that it ignores any explanation of human behaviour attributable to human agency. The implications that the cultural dilemma of the Drum School holds for the narratives of protest and resistance are also ignored. The argument about human agency and the cultural dilemma of the Drum School will be made based on the example of Can Themba (1924–1968).