The first award remembering a black South African journalist should have been named after ‘Mr Drum’ Arthur Maimane A panel of judges is probably already considering who should be the second journalist to be awarded the Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Black Journalism. The best of luck to whoever deserves to get it; but no such feelings towards whichever panel decided to name this award after the young man I knew on Drum magazine way back during what’s now referred to as “the golden age of black journalism”. It is the very first award I’ve heard of that’s named after an African journalist in this country, and thus prestigious. And however I might object to it being named after Nat Nakasa, I hold no grudge against him either and I was quite happy to be interviewed for the television documentary that introduced him and the award last year. And not only out of respect for the old-fashioned tradition to speak no evil of the dead: I have done so about a few I shall never miss. A few of us gathered at the London home of Lewis Nkosi when we heard the news from New York City that Nat had plunged to his death from an apartment off Central Park West during a despairing night. A smart section, another exile, Dollar Brand, assured us (before he switched to Abdullah Ibrahim), which meant our Nat must’ve had decent friends in the exile he had so reluctantly chosen when he was offered a Niemann Fellowship at Harvard but the nasty Nats wouldn’t grant him a passport. Only a one-way exit permit, and after his spell in academia he’d been homesick and miserable – and decided to take a diver into a different world. But at the grand inauguration of the Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Black Journalism, when the TV documentary had its first showing in Johannesburg decades later, his family disputed the suicide. They have a conspiracy theory that he was murdered, but don’t point fingers at any particular person or organisation – only hint at apartheid’s hit squads.
Nat came up from Durban in the mid-Fifties to become immortalised as a founder of that romantic golden age; but he was in fact a late addition – younger than the rest of us: still wet behind the ears, even if only a few years. And, inevitably, a moegoe since he was not only from outside Jo’burg or the Reef but from a different province. Drum was, like its writers who were learning journalism on the fly, also young and brash – and unknown. Not so the venerable Bantu World that was known to all madalas and owned by the Argus Group and, therefore, controlled by Anglo-American: a politically cautious weekly newspaper with no sense of adventure. But, still, the only paper which came near to being our own, written in the King’s English – which it wrote in a rather staid style. No choice in the townships – just locations in those days when a kaffir was called a kaffir, nothing euphemistic such as “a plural” when the Nats were somewhat sophisticated by the years in office.
And us, the location sophisticates who were ignorant of the finer points in journalism, broke most of the rules. Like not having white senior staff – editor, news editors and sub-editors who were not aware of what might interest the potential readers. It was into this inspirational anarchy that the bright young man from Durban stepped – tennis racquet and all: nobody we knew played the game – at least not in Sophiatown. That was a few years after the earnest Major Bob Crisp, hero of the desert war up north and first editor of The African Drum, got his marching orders when Jim Bailey – another war hero as a fighter pilot – took over. Bailey was a mining heir, but had quite different attitudes towards “de- tribalised natives” from Anglo-American as witnessed in its Bantu World. His editor, imported from England, was Anthony Sampson, who put together an advisory committee that included black luminaries such as JR Rathebe and Dan Twala. Their names came from Henry Nxumalo, who was the driving force of Drum and the very brave journalist the Nat Nakasa award should’ve been named after. Henry Nxumalo was a rare professional who’d freelanced for the Bantu World and the Rand Daily Mail that is the fount of Nakasa’s fame: the white paper’s first black columnist. Four decades later, Nxumalo is, in my book, still the masterpiece in bronze for black journalism. He was the father of “the golden age of black journalism” yet is hardly remembered and not recognised by the black journalism that has mushroomed since his murder. The Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Black Journalism should have been named after Henry Nxumalo, and not for a laaitie who committed suicide in New York at the age of 28. But Nat has been given that honour because he was not only the first African to write a regular column for the Rand Daily Mail but also launched and edited Classic, a literary magazine enjoyed by its limited readership. Nxumalo was the first and best investigative and campaigning journalist, and was murdered for his pains on a summer night in Western Native Township. He was the original Mr Drum and has been misrepresented in a book entitled Who Killed Mr Drum?, written in England recently by Sylvester Stein. Stein did follow Sampson as editor of Drum, but the rest of what’s supposed to be an account of that golden age is, well, fiction with himself at the centre of it all. I first met Nxumalo when Sampson brought me in for an interview after I’d been recommended to the Englishman by Father Trevor Huddleston. The English monk was also to launch the international music careers of Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa when he encouraged them – my fellow students at St Peter’s in Rosettenville – to form the Huddleston Jazz Band.
Nxumalo was a short and jaunty character in his thirties and so full of energy that he was always restless and jerky in his movements. The interview amounted to just a single, probing question that sounded like a joke to me, a laaitie more than 10 years younger: how, he asked, would I instruct a man from Mars to tie shoelaces – but without using my hands to demonstrate? I laughed, he scowled – and I passed that crucial test. Todd Matshikiza – another short, jaunty and restless man with the same verve for living – was already on Drum. And after Nxumalo’s murder he composed a tribute, Sad Times, Bad Times, first played by a trio at a memorial service which packed the Wits Great Hall – a rare “mixed” audience in the Fifties. It was a tribute to a friend and colleague that is now only remembered as one of the big-band tunes Todd composed for King Kong. The jazz opera was a hit at home and ran for months in London’s West End; and that, unfortunately, is now only a personal memory of the man who should have been the first to have a journalism prize awarded in his memory. Arthur Maimane’s novel, Hate No More, will be published in July by Kwela Books. It is set in Sophiatown at the time of “the golden age” and was banned during the apartheid years, but published to good reviews in Britain. And his book about more than 40 years in journalism – in South Africa and abroad – will also be published by Kwela Books
@ MR DRUM: RISKING LIFE AND LIMB Arthur Maimane It started as something of a joke – the decision that Drum must run a first-hand expos’ in every birthday issue, starting with the first. Henry Nxumalo risked life and limb to investigate the first-birthday expos’, which detonated in February 1952. The series made Drum world famous, but Henry had to protect his identity under the anonymous name of “Mr Drum”. Semi-slavery on Bethal potato farms was first to be revealed, but it took ingenuity and effort for Henry to get himself arrested on the right charge to serve a brief spell as a convict labourer on the farms around Bethal. He did finally dig out potatoes with his bare hands. Like the hundreds of other convicts sold cheap to farmers, wearing only a mealie sack to discourage any escapes. But Nxumalo did escape when he dug up enough first- hand information about brutalities that killed convicts while others were never allowed to go home at the end of their sentences. And Henry went back with photographer Jurgen Schadeberg to get proof even the government could not deny. It was forced to set up a commission of enquiry. The Fort in Johannesburg: Henry had himself arrested to reveal abuses of prison regulations at “Number Four” as it was known to prisoners and their friends. Bob Gosani took the infamous tausa photographs that proved Henry’s revelations from the roof of the nurses’ home which overlooked the prison yard with a long and heavy wooden camera borrowed from Pat Smith. The sports photographer had constructed it in his garage at a time when telephoto and zoom lenses had not yet been invented. The tausa was a humiliating and illegal exercise: on returning from the day’s hard labour stark- naked bandiete had to leap into the air so warders could check they were not hiding contraband up their rectums. That was only one of the several ways that prison regulations were contravened – and that Henry exposed. Again an official inquiry and pledges that regulations would be strictly observed. But they were again ignored – and Henry went back into prison to prove that fact. A contract killing to gag Mr Drum: Henry Nxumalo was murdered – stabbed repeatedly – while he was investigating the abortion racket run by a white doctor in Sophiatown and Western Native Township.