John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
I am not simply returning a compliment when I say that it was somewhat uplifting to see Aggrey Klaaste stand up in St George’s church, Parktown, Johannesburg, last Tuesday afternoon, and deliver a warm and honest tribute to the late Jim Bailey.
It was a particularly striking gesture because on the same day, not far away in another part of Johannesburg, the issue of racism in the media was being interrogated by the Human Rights Commission (HRC). Particular emphasis was being given to the question of media ownership, and the implication that, in an environment where most organs of the press are still white-owned, the media were generally guilty of delivering a white agenda.
So what were Klaaste and a smattering of other black faces (my own included) doing sitting in the spartan pews of St George’s, joining a packed house in paying our last respects to the man best known as the founder and publisher of the late, great Drum magazine? (I say “late”, because the magazine that goes under the same banner these days is not even a pale imitation of the original.)
Drum, after all, was the double-edged icon of that extraordinary black renaissance period of the 1950s – the free and sparkling black voice that was controlled by what Anthony Sampson, its pioneering editor, dubbed “the White Hand”. The “White Hand” belonged to its publisher, Jim Bailey.
Under today’s frames of reference, “Lord Jim” would have been summoned to explain himself before the HRC, along with the rest of South Africa’s opinion shapers.
Jim Bailey was not an easy character to pin down. Race was a frequent subtext, whether seriously or in jest, among the black journalists who found themselves in his eccentric company, and equally eccentric employ. “Go to Jim Bailey’s funeral? Over my dead body,” would be a not uncommon expression in those times.
But if certain key characters, like Henry Nxumalo, Todd Matshikiza and Can Themba, had survived to see the dawn of a new South Africa, would they still have had the same attitude to Jim’s passing? I somehow doubt it. I suspect that they would have been there to pay the same kind of tribute as Klaaste was moved to pay on that sunny Jo’burg afternoon – just as Jim, to his dying days, would pay tribute to those feisty, creative, erratic sons and daughters of Africa who made his magazine what it was.
They never had an easy relationship, Jim and those black journos, and they exchanged their fair share of terminal abuse. But they all knew that, somehow or other, they made the damn thing work, like nothing else worked in that accursed space of South Africa. In black-and- white, and because of “black” and “white” – and because of the pearls that could sometimes be bred out of the gnawing irritation of the one’s presence under the skin of the other – they produced that unique and unrepeatable commodity that was Drum.
Drum was always pregnant with the odour of that sweet-and-sour relationship. There was the worldy-wise, unworldly Bailey, son of a minor randlord, putting up his own money to create a monthly magazine written by streetwise blacks for streetwise blacks. What was his game?
As Klaaste pointed out in his tribute, Bailey never made a cent out of the enterprise. He kept on ploughing his own pennies, and whatever pennies were made on the news-stands, back into the crazy venture – paying the journalists peanuts on the way, just for the sake of keeping it going.
He was alternately outrageously daring and infuriatingly cautious as a publisher. He sometimes seemed to be playing both sides of the intensely dangerous South African game at the same time. So what was he up to?
At the same time, what were those black writers up to – risking everything, including their own lives, to keep on appearing, with such style, in the pages of Drum? They weren’t fools, and they weren’t stooges.
Responding to news that the magazine’s circulation had rocketed since the “darky” influence had made Drum a force to be reckoned with, Todd Matshikiza, way back in 1953 or thereabouts, had said:
“Sixty thousand, and all done by darkies! Shucks, that’ll show ’em – a real darkies’ paper!” But then, according to Sampson, his face grew mock-serious: “I wish I could find a darky rich enough to buy Drum. Then I could sack you [Sampson] and Mr Bailey.”
The comment was made up equally of seriousness and jest. Sure, every black person, especially a creative one, wants to have the white person, who, voluntarily or not, is associated with a system of oppression, off their back and out of their face. But at the same time, these particular white persons were rather peculiar. They not only employed you: they drank with you (breaking the law in the process), they ate with you – they got up close and personal, and generally acted dangerously close to the way friends behave. And they usually allowed you to say what you wanted, in print, and sometimes even admitted that they had learned something in the process.
Another part of the subtext was: if you could find that elusive darky who was rich enough to buy Drum, would she/he allow you the rambling freedoms you enjoyed under the likes of the eccentric yet tight-fisted Bailey? Or would they exact a politically correct price that you, as a wild and free spirit, African or otherwise, could not agree to pay?
There are no answers to these questions, and I am merely appropriating the unspoken thoughts of the dead in a limbo of personal exploration.
But in the other, sun-spangled limbo of that farewell to Jim Bailey in a Parktown church this week, I did begin to wonder whether this issue of racism, the media and the world at large can be dealt with so easily and conclusively, after all. The awkward, unclassifiable career of Jim Bailey is a case in point.