July 28, 2005
By Lucille Davie
FOR just a moment Sophiatown lives ... and dies again ... on celluloid. With a cast of British, American and South African actors the colourful but desperately poor suburb of Johannesburg comes alive in Drum, the movie.
Sophiatown is recreated in believable form by director Zola Maseko, and - except for the odd lapse in accents - the actors successfully portray the creative bunch of journalists who worked on Drum magazine in the 1950s.
The magazine stood alone in the media of the time, portraying what life was like for blacks living precariously on the edge of white society, epitomised in the multi-cultural microcosm of Sophiatown, a suburb some 12 kilometres north-west of the Joburg CBD.
Drum was printed in three editions: one for Joburg, another aimed at the coloured market in Cape Town, and one for Indians in KwaZulu-Natal.
Sophiatown, in its overcrowded squalor, was filled with dilapidated houses, backyard shacks and dusty streets, but vibrant jazz clubs and bars frequented by gangsters. It died in 1955 when the suburb was dismantled.
Residents were forcefully removed over the next eight years and dumped in box houses in Meadowlands, Soweto. The film captures the removals in small scale, and within its R40-million budget, does a credible job.
Henry Nxumalo
The movie focuses on the life of Henry Nxumalo, portrayed by American Taye Diggs, and gives a glancing impression of other talented journalists Can Themba and Todd Matshikiza.
Photographer Jurgen Schadeberg, played by Gabriel Mann, photographs Nxumalo on the two assignments he is most famous for: living a demeaning life with farm labourers in Bethal, and being thrown into Joburg's notorious No 4 jail. Here he witnessed the brutality experienced in an apartheid jail.
Nxumalo, or Mr Drum, spent four days in jail. In his article, "Mr Drum goes to jail" he described the reception office as having a "terrifyingly brutal atmosphere".
He recorded how he was hit and sworn at by warders; how 60 prisoners had to share a toilet bucket; how they slept on the floor on a filthy blanket; and how they were stripped naked and searched every day.
"In the four days I was in prison - I got a remission of one day - I was kicked or thrashed every day. I saw many prisoners being thrashed daily. I was never told what was expected of me, but had to guess. Sometimes I guessed wrong and got into trouble."
Zola Maseko
Although Maseko claims to have researched Jim Bailey's archives for the movie, the casting of Bailey, played by Jason Flemyng, as the editor is puzzling. Bailey was the owner of
Drum; Anthony Sampson was its first editor.
Maseko, who specialised in documentary at the National Film and Television School in England, has filmed two documentaries: Dear Sunshine and Scenes from Exile.
Born in exile in 1967, he returned to South Africa in 1994 to write and direct the fictional The Foreigner. In 1998 he directed The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, which won Best Newcomer at Sithengi, the South African film and TV awards.
He is now working on a three-part TV series called Homecoming, and a feature film, Liverpool Leopard.
In a recent Mail & Guardian interview, Maseko says, "I have seen audiences coming out of this film crying. For me it is an achievement when you realise how difficult it is for people to be moved to tears."
Hollywood
It is a pity, however, that he holds up Hollywood as his role model. He proudly states that for just R40-million he was able to create a movie that looks like a Hollywood film. "This is what African film should aspire to," he says.
At Fespaco 2005, Africa's premier film festival in Burkina Faso, he said Drum had set the "aesthetic standard that all African films should emulate". It won the Etalon d'Or de Yennenga or the Golden Stallion of Yennenga award, beating 20 other films, with a cash prize of $20 000, or about R133 000.
Most of Drum's journalists are now dead - many of them died young. Sylvester Stein, Sampson's replacement, in his Who killed Mr Drum???, says of them, "They died long ago and far too early, our men; yet with a fine kind of irony that would have appealed to them, they are more alive today than those who killed them ... it is they who live on in our histories."
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