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ANTHONY SAMPSON |
| When Anthony Sampson arrived in Johannesburg from London in December 1951 at the age of twenty-five to take up the editorship of Drum magazine, he initiated the most remarkable period in the history of this extraordinary review. He was one of principal creative forces that enabled Drum do its utmost best to reflect the great activity of the African people at the moment of their entrance into modernity. It is the spectacular activity of the African people in the making of South African modernity that made Drum magazine the great reflective mirror, rather than only the literary, artistic and photographic talent of Ranjyth Kally, Gopal Naransamy, G. R. Naidoo, Lewis Nkosi, Arthur Maimane and others made it so. The genius of Anthony Sampson was his immediate awareness of the consequences this monumental and historic shift of the urban New African masses from identifying with tradition to their embracing of modernity. It would not be wrong to postulate that it was Sampson very rare intuitive ability in grasping the complexities and nuances of dramatic historic changes that were being effected in the political and cultural spheres that made Nadine Gordimer to be deeply fascinated with him in the early 1950s. Approximately thirty years after the fact, Nadine Gordimer recalls the moment of this encounter and the fascination that ensued from it: "When Anthony Sampson took over DRUM, he had, from the beginning, an extraordinary ease which a middle-class white like myself certainly didn't have. Through him, I got to know the whole group of DRUM personalities, starting with the famous Henry Nxumalo, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi and Todd Matshikiza. They were absolutely extraordinary people. I remember going to parties with Anthony. I had never been in a black township in my life except when I was in amateur dramatics. Anthony really put us all to shame because here was this young man from Oxford rushing around on his motorbike as if the differences of colour and taboo didn't count at all. I think he influenced a lot of white journalists and people in the arts, making us realise that you could live in another way" ("Nadine Gordimer[: An Interview]", in Sophiatown Speaks, eds. Pippa stein and Ruth Jacobson, 1986). In his 1957 memoir of this particular historical moment, Drum, Sampson reflects on the political poetics of the transformation from one historical consciousness to another, and from one historical moment to another. Anthony Sampson was to meditate on this issue or theme again nearly forty years later when he wrote a essay in Jurgen Schadeberg's Images from the black '50s: "The early 1950s---black Johannesburg! I had the good luck to find myself in the midst of this exciting world when I was invited to South Africa to become editor of Drum. Drum was a hugely circulating magazine which provided an outlet for black writing and journalism. And it brought me into close contact with many of the most talented black writers and photographers of that time. Can Themba, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Henry Nxumalo, Arthur Maimane, Casey Motsisi, and Bob Gosani. Now their names are the stuff of legend. Then, they represented young and irrepressible talent. It was an era when creative young blacks, despite the hardships and constrains, could still express their own aspirations and self-awareness, with an energy and optimism which, during the later decades of oppression, appeared full of both courage and irony. And now in the 1990s, with the relaxing of police restrains and the unbanning of black political organisations, a new generation looks back on the 1950s as a golden age of writers, artists and musicians. What struck me most in the early 1950s was the irreconcilable contrast between the vigour with which black people at all levels were adapting themselves to city life, and the determination of the apartheid government to prevent them from becoming part of it. At the simplest level young black workers were recruited from the impoverished rural areas to work the gold mines: they knew of the hardships, but they were still attracted to the excitement of 'The Golden City'. At another level, black writers and intellectuals were cutting their links with their country roots and embracing the complexities, dangers and tensions of urban life. I arrived in Johannesburg fresh from Oxford, where I had been studying Elizabethan literature, seemingly a world away from the black urban buzz. Not so, however. The vibrating life of the shebeens in the blacl townships of Johannesburg seemed far closer to the Shakespearean world, and particularly to Falstaff's world, than anything I had encountered in Britain. There was the same sense of constant danger and uncertainty, the pressing together of intellectuals, gangsters and ordinary workers, the excitement with city life, of newcomers from the country, and above all the discovery of language and ideas with a freshness which the English themselves had lost. . . . By the 1950s South Africa already had many more urbanised black communities than existed in most other parts of Africa. Since the end of the last century black townships had grown up around the gold and diamond mines. These were now producing a third and fourth generation of urban black people. The second world war had brought a new boom to Johannesburg and had encouraged a new optimism among black in South Africa: an expectation that they would become part of a larger western world, in keeping with wartime idealism and anti-racism" ("Black Johannesburg in the 1950s", 1990 [1994], my emphasis). Dhlomo in his great theoretical essays on African drama in the 1930s made a similar argument to Sampson that the transitions and transformations the African people were undergoing from feudal relations of production or pre-capitalist social formations (read: 'traditional societies') to capitalist relations of production (read: 'modernity') were comparable to those that had occurred during the Elizabethan era. The point of Dhlomo's contextualization was to indicate the relevance of Shakespeare for contemporary South Africa: since Shakespeare grappled with the consequences of the historical beginnings of 'modernity' in the Renaissance period, and South Africa was in the process of making its own transitional moment into modernity in the early twentieth-century, the great dramatist had many historical lessons to impart concerning personality, dramatic form, and history to Dhlomo's contemporaries. The astuteness of Sampson is in making Drum immediately reflect what was happening in South Africa on being informed by the New African masses that the historical project of the moment was the construction of modernity. Perhaps what has made Drum magazine more renowned than other reviews of the 1950s which were of a higher intellectual caliber than it such as Liberation or Fighting Talk was it being a cultural mirror reflecting the historical drama of the making of South African modernity. The immediacy of this recognition on the part of Sampson, and the decisiveness of the editorial decision to give due cognisance to its historical importance, both account for the high esteem in which he is held. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison approximately a decade ago, on that historic date of February 11, 1990, it was Anthony Sampson who, had come back to South Africa in matter days, conveyed to Nadine Gordimer that the great man wanted to see her. Gordimer was the first choice of Mandela to write his autobiography. But the American publishers thought otherwise. That Sampson has just published the official biography of Mandela bespeaks to the high regard in which he is held by the last generation of the New African Movement. In fact, in Drum, Sampson captured the last portrait of these New African intellectuals before their scattering into exile largely as a result of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. This date marks the terminus of the New African Movement. | |