Arthur Maimane

John Arthur Mogale Maimane (5 October 1932 – 28 June 2005), better known as Arthur Maimane, was a South African journalist and novelist.

Maimane was born in Pretoria, growing up in the black township of Lady Selborne. He was educated at St Peter's College, Johannesburg, also known as the "Black Eton" of South Africa (Oliver Tambo was his mathematics teacher before becoming a lawyer and president of the African National Congress). Maimane was originally intending to study medicine, when a young priest, Trevor Huddleston (who was involved in the Sophiatown forced removals), persuaded him to take a vacation job at Drum magazine. As a result, Maimane choose journalism as his life career. He was a versatile journalist for Drum, covering a wide spectrum of subjects, including writing sports reports, thriller and interviews with beauty queens and other celebrities.

Joining Drum in the early 1950s, he was mentored by Henry Nxumalo. The photograph of Maimane in Anthony Sampson's 1956 book Drum: A Venture into the New Africa, "trilby on back of head, cigarette dangling", is an amusing take-off of the Hollywood "newshound" image, but conceals his innate seriousness as a reporter and analyst of the world around him.

Under the pseudonym Arthur Mogale, he wrote a regular series for Drum entitled "The Chief", in which he described gangster incidents he had heard about in the shebeens. Don Mattera, a leading Sophiatown gangster, took exception to this: "The gangsters were pissed off with him and there was a word out that we should wipe this guy off."

Maimane moved to Golden City Post, Drum magazine's sister daily paper, as the news editor but did not stay long. In 1958, the year after his friend Nxumalo was murdered by unknown assailants, Maimane moved to Ghana to work on the West African edition of Drum. In 1961, he moved to London. The young editor accepted a position at Reuters and was posted to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania as its East African correspondent. There he met his second wife, Jenny, and, when he was deported from Tanzania after refusing the founding editorship of TANU's new daily and for critically reporting political events, they both returned to London, England.

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