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ARTHUR MAIMANE |
| Arthur Maimane (1932- ): Arthur Maimane is his direct reflection on the historical era of Drum magazine, forty years after the fact, reflected on what he considers to have been its golden period as exemplified by what he refers to as its most brilliant exponent. Given that of all the Sophiatown Renaissance writers Maimane had one of the longest tenures on the review, and one of the last survivors, it is not surprising that his recollection is on the formation and making of Drum magazine. In the Foreword to Jurgen Schadeberg's Images from the black '50s (1994), Maimane makes the following observations: "For a brief time there was a new monthly magazine called African Drum. The first word in the title indicated it was intended for Africans in a country where race and colouring determined everybody's position in society. It was also a time of the emergence of an Afrikaner government that had vowed to put everybody firmly in their place, political and social, through legislation that went under the umbrella of a concocted Afrikaans name, apartheid---which soon attempted to hide its sinister purpose by claiming to be 'separate development'. Neither the African Drum nor apartheid was popular with Africans, now insistently called Natives by the Nationalist Party government, which claimed African-ness for its own race, the Afrikaners. But it in time realised that it was abdicating its proclaimed native status to black people, and so-called them Bantu---which, alas, only means 'people'. The black magazine also dropped 'African' from its title and became, simply, Drum---a publication that was to interest people of all colours, and not only in South Africa, by indirectly opposing a government that was to change apartheid's official names for decades in its attempt to make the ideology palatable to the country and the world. . . . The bravest journalist ever to pound a typewriter in South Africa had himself arrested and, with some difficulty, convicted: friends around the courts were too willing to pay the fines he pretended he could not afford. Henry Nxumalo came back from the potato farms around Bethal haggard and dirty---but ready to joke about the brutal experiences from which he had finally escaped when he had enough information. And Henry was willing to return to Bethal for Jurgen Schadeberg to take photographs that would be be incontrovertible proof of the expose he would write. . . . For another Drum birthday, Henry Nxumalo had himself arrested to give a first-hand account of the routine breaching of regulations at The Fort, a former military base that had become a prison, which loomed over the centre of Johannesburg and was known by its black inmates as 'Number Four'." In these statements Maimane indicates that Drum magazine was not only concerned with the impact of modernity on urbanised Africans, it also inaugurated a serious tradition of investigative reporting which was initiated by Henry Nxumalo. Nxumalo was the most influential figure or intellectual in the early years of the Drum review. He was the first person to work for the magazine. In a sense, he was instrumental in establishing its intellectual traditions. The influence of Nxumalo on Arthur Maimane was a direct one: since it was the former as Editor of Sports who imparted the culture and knowledge of the trade to the latter who was a Boxing Correspondent. Maimane may have been the second person following Nxumalo to have joined Drum as writer and journalist. In the process of fine-tuning the prose on Maimane, Nxumalo had ample occasion to give lessons to the young intellectual about the importance of popular culture. Nxumalo and Maimane were adamant in their belief that Drum magazine should centrally concern itself with popular culture and the popular imgaination, in contrast to Ezekiel Mphahlele and Lewis Nkosi who insisted that the review should largely concern itself with high culture and the intellectual imagination of the emerging African middle class. This struggle which played itself fiercely on the pages of Drum until 1957, when Nxumalo was tragically murdered and Mphahlele went into self-imposed exile in Nigeria, has not been given the scholarly attention it deserves. The fundamental question until then from the perspective of Drum magazine was whether the African urban cultural space was to be determined by popular culture or high culture! From 1957 Drum magazine was unambiguous in its alignment with popular culture. The founding of Drum sister newspaper in 1955, Golden City Post, was the actualization of this intellectual victory. It is this affiliation that provoked deep intellectual anger from example Daniel Kunene and Mazisi Kunene when from exile in the 1970s and in the 1980s they reflected on the role of Drum magazine in shaping the cultural imagination of Africans in the 1950s. In 1986, from his base and post at the University of Wisconsin, Daniel P. Kunene, bringing a different inflection to the issue, arguing that a popular culture for the masses could not have found representation in Drum magazine since the review was written in English instead of one of the African languages, wrote the following: "The claim that a book written in English is addressed to blacks makes no sense unless one specifies that it is for those blacks who have acquired enough English to be able to read and understand it. Then we would understand that it is not intended for the masses, counted in millions, who do not have that skill. Ezekiel Mphahlele, interviewed in 1979 by Noel Chabani Manganyi makes a similarly surprising statement. Referring to the mid-fifties, he claims that the then-budding, elitist group of writers who were mostly journalists working for Drum magazine, wrote a 'proletarian literature'. . . . Ever restricting one's comments to Johannesburg, one cannot see stories written in English reaching any significant number od workers, let alone the millions of rural Africans and migrant workers for whom Drum an urban magazine, was so totally irrelevant. The problem with the Drum generation of writers is that they failed to place their writing within the context of the long tradition of verbal art, both oral and written, especially that devoted to the struggle. A knowledge of the tradition and an acknowledgement of its contribution to the long, continuous fight against the forces of oppression would have broken this self-imposed isolation and instilled a salutary sense of humility, if not pride. It might also have opened the eyes of the Drum group to the fact that a proletarian literature can only be written in a language that is understood by the masses" ("Language, Literature and the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa", Staffrider, vol. 6 no. 3, 1986). [In parenthesis: at the 1987 Bad Boll Conference (in the then West Germany) on South African Literature, in which both Lewis Nkosi, then teaching at the University of Warsaw, and Daniel Kunene, were in attendance, was filled with incredible tension because of this essay. Someone at the conference, in all probability, Robert Kriger, the organizer of the event, gave Nkosi the essay since he was not aware of it. I remembered that throughout the conference Nkosi being outraged constantly saying that Kunene was totally irresponsible for having written this. As far as I'm aware Lewis Nkosi never responded directly to this justified historical criticism. Whether he actually confronted Kunene, I do not recall.] Ezekiel Mphahlele as early as 1957, when he left South Africa for Nigeria, he published an essay in Paris based Presence Africaine in which he formulated his beloved thesis that the Drum writers were preoccupied with creating proletarian literature: " " (September 1957). Why would Mphahlele think that his creative cohorts were engaged with creating proletarian perspectives, forms and ideologies in literature when all of them were unsympathetic, or more appropriately, intellectually ignorant of Marxism is mystifying. More likely, Mphahlele mistakenly thought of popular culture as the same as proletarian culture. This can only bespeak to the absence of serious political practice and cultural politics within the creative process of the Sophiatown Renaissance. This is one of the things that Lewis Nkosi lamented the most when in the 1960s in exile reflected on what had occurred or not occurred in the previous decade in the cultural creations of Sophiatown intellectuals ("The Fabulous Decade: The Fifties", in Home and Exile and Other Selections [1965, 1983]). Mazisi Kunene is perhaps the major South African intellectual who has always had a low estimation of the cultural and creative achievements of the Sophiatown Renaissance writers. Kunene repeatedly voiced this opinion over a two decade period. His criticism too was principally around the question of the language of representation. Despite these criticism it is fascinating to trace the early forms of the stylistics of what came to be known later as Drum writing style. This creation and invention of the style of writing went hand in hand with the task of creating a modern popular culture. It was arguably the writings of Henry Nxumalo in 1951 and Arthur Maimane in 1952, before the writers came abosard Drum magazine to constitute a cultural movement, that was at the forefront of this creative endeavour. Though Can Themba was later to seen as the best exemplification of the Drum writing style, it was Nxumalo and Maimane who launched its essential form. Here is Henry Nxumalo practising the beginning moments of the colloquial form of this writing style: "Don't let anyone kid you about the prospects of the cricket game among Africans this season . . . they're as bright as ever. Remember, the game is comparatively young here, and still lacks the spell-binding glamour that may be found in thrustful games such as boxing and football; it hasn't got the cash either, for it hasn't got the means of making it. So, the fact that the Coloureds, Indians and Africans were able to form the triangular South African Non-European Cricket Board, which staged the first ever interrace Test in Johannesburg ten months ago is, in mitself, an outstanding achievement. It is in that spirit of faith in the future and in themselves that African cricketers entered the season a fortnight ago. As the scope of play now includes other non-white racial groups, it means that players will now be able to aspire for something more than ordinary provincial cap---a place in a representative African side" ("The Gen. . . . About All Sports", Drum, November 1951). The Americanisms in this extract from a beautiful long essay are evident. It was perhaps the mutual appreciation of the importance of New Negro modernity for the New African modernity that drew Henry Nxumalo and Peter Abrahams into a deep intellectual friendship. Abrahams maps the structure of this friendship in the best appreciative essay ever written on Nxumalo in his book Return to Egoli (1953). Abrahams himself had brought the Americanisms of the New Negro to South African literature through his novel Mine Boy (1946). Arthur Maimane, following in the tradition of his mentor, was to write the following a year later concerning boxing: "Early in 1950 Fred Thabede, Johannesburg matchmaker, was in trouble. He had the services of the then phenomenal flyweight champ Kid Snowball; but no opponents for him. He offered me the fight---it would be my first pro fight. Flushed with my 25 amateur victories, I was confident. He was a wonderful champ, I thought, but I wasn't going to let him punch me about just because of that. If he hit me, I would try to hit him harder. For the first 5 rounds Snowball showed his famous form. He danced about, throwing all the punches in the book and trying to confuse me. I was careful. I stalked him round the ring, waiting for a chance to give him my best. From the sixth I knew I had him where I wanted him. I began pouring on the coal with my left. Then in the 10th my chance came. I sank a right in his middle, and as he came down picked him up with a right to the jaw. That was the end of THAT fight" ("My Boxing Life as told by Young Jake Ntuli", Drum, November 1952). Here also the colloquailism of the style is apparent. When Henry Nxumalo tragically died in 1957, Arthur Maimane replaced him as the Sports Editor. In the late 1950s, in his narrative detective story strips, incorporating into them the style and the sensibility of the American crime writers such as Perry Mason and James Hadley Chase, Maimane was in may ways following on the inspiration of Nxumalo. For Maimane Drum was Nxumalo and Nxumalo was Drum magazine. This singular identification remained constant in Maimane's imagination despite the thirty years spent in exile. Consequently, when Jurgen Schadeberg seven years ago requested Arthur Maimane to write a Foreword to Images from the black '50s (1994), it is totally understandable he would spontaneously revert to the historical memory of Henry Nxumalo. After all, it was Nxumalo who had taught him the finer points of modernistic cultural sensibility. | |