‘Tough guy, eh?’: The gangster‐figure in Drum

Mac Fenwick

Journal of Southern African Studies, 1996, vol. 22, issue 4, 617-632

Abstract: As black South Africans moved into urban areas like Sophiatown during the 1950s, they began to search for a new identity to replace the rural life that they had left behind and that the white government was trying to keep alive through propaganda and, failing that, repressive legislation. One of the more surprising sources of this new identity was Hollywood gangster films. The fascination with gangsters that was shared by all levels of cultural production in Sophiatown, including both the real gangsters themselves and the “intellectual tsotsis” who wrote stories and articles about them in Drum magazine, reveals more than just a thirst for escapism on the part of Drum readership and staff. What the Drum writers found in the Hollywood gangster was a figure who was always/already foreign to and in conflict with the wider state apparatus in which he lived and parasitically thrived. As a part of their wider project of resisting tribalisation and the credo of separate development, the writers at Drum took this already subversive element of American culture and appropriated it to black South Africa. They were thus able to create a figure who was an economic rebel at home in, and defined by, his black urban context. This appropriation in turn allowed them (not unproblematically) to elaborate in their own society a subject‐position that was both attractive to non‐intellectuals, and congruent with the cultural and artistic aspirations of those more highly‐educated urban writers who were trying to create for themselves a ‘truly’ black South African identity.

Date: 1996
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DOI: 10.1080/03057079608708515

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