Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Writing about his involvement on Drum in Creative Camera, 1984,
Kerry Swift wrote:
10
It is probably fair to say that the lack of recognition for the later Drum
reflects its steady slide to mediocrity after the tumultuous years of
the 1950s and early 1960s when the forces of nationalism in South
Africa were flexing their muscles and testing their ground. The quality
of picture magazines depends heavily on the social milieu they reflect
at given times. Just as Picture Post and Signal found ample subject
during the 1939-45 conflict, so Drum’s ‘golden years’ coincided with
the steady entrenchment of apartheid in South Africa and the black
response to it. It would be a deaf, dumb and blind editor who could not
capture at least some highlights of that primordial conflict in a black
magazine. Anthony Sampson and Tom Hopkinson produced some fine
journalism in the early Drum, being men of quite exceptional talent.
There appears to be a seminal flow to black response in South Africa.
Where one generation of black resisters encountered police bullets at
Sharpeville in 1960, a second generation felt the wrath of the State
after a banzai charge into the cannon’s mouth during the nationwide
riots sparked off in Soweto in June 1976. The first tide of black protest
in the 1950s and the early 1960s provided Drum journalists with
fertile ground for photo-reportage which they exploited with skill and
considerable flair. But when this tide abated, Drum seemed to slip into
a state of creative torpor which accurately reflected the socio-political
fortunes of its readers.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE