Drum (South African magazine)
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| Year founded | 1951 |
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| Country | South Africa |
| Based in | Johannesburg |
| Language | English |
| Website | www |
DRUM is a South African family magazine mainly aimed at black readers containing market news, entertainment and feature articles. It has two sister magazines: Huisgenoot (aimed at White and Coloured Afrikaans-speaking readers) and YOU (aimed at demographically diverse South African English-speaking readers of different ethnicities to inform, inspire and entertain them by offering its own brand of coverage on current events and interesting people).
In 2005 it was described as "the first black lifestyle magazine in Africa", but it is noted chiefly for its early 1950s and 1960s reportage of township life under apartheid.
Drum was started in 1951, as African Drum by former test cricketer and author Bob Crisp and Jim Bailey an ex-R.A.F. pilot, son of South African financier Sir Abe Bailey.
Initially under Crisp's editorship, the magazine had a paternalistic, tribal representation of Africans, but within a short time Crisp was replaced and the emphasis moved to the vibrant urban black townships.
The paper in its early years had a series of outstanding editors:
Both Sampson and Stein wrote books about their times as editor, Drum: A Venture into the New Africa (1956, republished in 2005 as Drum: the making of a magazine) and Who Killed Mr Drum? (1999) respectively.
Drum's heyday in the 1950s fell between the Defiance Campaign and the tragedy at Sharpeville. This was the decade of potential Black emergence, the decade when the Freedom Charter was written and the decade when the ANC alliance launched the Defiance Campaign. The aim was to promote an equal society. The Nationalist government responded with apartheid crackdowns and treason trials.
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