TOM HOPKINSON

By the time Tom Hopkinson took over as editor of Drum in early 1958, the monthly magazine had gone through numerous changes under different editors. By this time its historic moment as a living expression of the modernistc changes its African readers were undergoing was already in the past. Its first editor from its founding in March 1951 Robert Crisp had difficulty in finding its readership because the monthly preoccupied itself with traditiona l societies in the country side rather engaging questions of modernity which in the urban areas of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and other big cities were grappling with. It is not accidental that Crisp lasted only a few months as the owner of Drum Jim Bailey desperately searched for an editor who not only had journalistic skills but also one who would expand its readership. Bailey brought Anthony Sampson from England in late 1951. Sampson had the intuition to sense that the monthly would only be viable if it dealt with the urban experiences of Africans in the process of entering modernity and struggling with its complex forms. Retrospectively, it would seem that it was during Sampson's stewardship of Drum , the period from early 1952 to late 1954, that it was completely in synchrony with the modernistic aspirations of the enlightened segment of the African people. Having succeeded in finding its proper readership, the magazine immediately found itself caught between the dialectical tension of intellectual, cultural aspirations and the commercial interests it sought to realize. By the time Sampson left, this issue had not been fully resolved. By the time its third editor Sylvester Stein, the period from early 1955 to the end of 1957, Jim Bailey had decided that political and cultural issues would be subordinated to commercial imperatives. As a consequence of this choice the magazine became a forum of yellow journalism and published endless sensational stories. This shift towards sensationalism was one of the reasons that serious intellectuals and seasoned journalists began drifting away from if not literally fleeing its commercial trajectory: Ezekiel Mphahlele left for Nigeria in 1957; Bloke Modisane left Drum in 1958 to work with Lionel Rogosin in the making of Come Back Africa and subsequently left fot Europe in 1959; Lewis Nkosi left for Harvard University in early 1961, having found the direction of Golden City Post (the weekly newspaper which was also owned by Jim Bailey) untenable. From 1958 onwards Lewis Nkosi started publishing his serious journalism in Contact , the Liberal Party weekly newspaper. In its heyday the magazine had published excellent short stories, had established a serious investigative tradition, and had printed captivating photography. By the time of the tenure of Tom Hopkinson from early 1958 to late 1961 this noble tradition was a thing of the past. His attempt to continue or resurrect the golden cultural years of the magazine met the strenuous objections of Jim Bailey who felt that this threatened its commercial survival since it would alter its readership from the lumpen proletariat who constituted its base to the readership of the incipient black middle class. One of the saddest things about Tom Hopkinson's autobiography In the Fiery Continent (1963) is its potrayal of his struggle with Jim Bailey about this fundamental matter: serious investigative journalism or yellow journalism. Whereas Hopkinson wanted under his stewardship to model Drum on the French magazine such as Paris-Match or the American magazine Life , Jim Bailey was intent on the direction towards the tabloids. But to be fair to Jim Bailey, he did allow coverage of political matters, provided it was not tinged by socialistic orientations. What is ironic is that Hopkinson was arguably the most journalistically skilled and the most experienced of all the Drum editors, having worked for many years previous to coming to South Africa on some of the leading London newspapers and weeklies. Having been the most skilled does not necessarily make Hopkinson the best of the editors. To posterity Drum will always be associated with the editorialship of Anthony Sampson. Two dramatic things happened to Drum during the time of Hopkinson: it made a subtle change in its political coverage from the African National Congress (ANC) towards the emergent voice of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC); the dominant voices of cultural expressiveness within Drum moved from Africans to Indians and Coloureds. The former change may perhaps be associated with Mathew Nkoana coming aboard the magazine as a budding journalist, while the Nkosis, the Modisanes and the Mphahleles were fleeing; the contentious nature of the brilliance of Nkoana was to make itself evident in the exile period when his intellectual preoccupations where the most sparkling within the PAC, albeit tragically marginalized. The latter shift in all probability should be associated with G. R. Naidoo, the Durban based editor of the magazine, who was both journalist and photographer. Naidoo's serialized essay of 1959 on the role of Indians in the making of South African history has to be one of the high marks in Drum 's cultural history. One other reason for this second change is that Tom Hopkinson emphasized photojournalism than heretofore had been the case. Superb Indian and Coloured photographers such as Lionel Oostendorp, Barney Desai, Gopal Naransamy, Ranjith Kally found their forte in the pages of the magazine at this time. This alteration could also be linked with the departure of the German photographer Jürgen Schadeberg from Drum in 1959, and the dramatic entrance of the English photographer Ian Berry in the context of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. While Tom Hopkinson was in the midst of all these changes, he had to supervise the Kenyan and the Nigerian editions of Drum . The tribulations he encountered with these foreign editions of Drum which were initially printed in South Africa make for fascinating reading in the autobiography. Although today in 2004 Tom Hopkinson's name is hardly mentioned in South Africa in association with Drum magazine, he will undoubtedly get his due one day. After his tenure and departure to England , Drum descended into tabloidism with such a vengeance that Jim Bailey felt compelled to sell the magazine in 1965.