Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Tony Sutton, editor of South Africa’s Drum magazine during the 1976
schoolkids’rebellion, tells how Drum’s coverage of one of the most
momentous events in South Africa’s history earned it a 25-year ban:
Glancing through the pages of Drum magazine 40 years after the events
of June 16, 1976, I’m surprised by how little space we devoted to the
riots in the issue that followed the initial violence. Then I remember that
the magazine had just switched from fortnightly to monthly publishing,
and we were trapped by brutal print deadlines – six weeks from delivery
of pages to the printer to printed magazines – that were geared for
timeless features rather than fast-breaking news. So that month’s
coverage of one of the most momentous events in South Africa’s history
was limited to just four hasty pages, with a front page teaser – “THE
RIOTS: Why They Happened” – pasted across the top-right corner of a
cover image of an unnamed local beauty.
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Inside that July ’76 issue are reports by co-editor Stan Motjuwadi and
chief reporter Joe Thloloe, accompanied by photographs by Mike
Mzileni, who was soon to be detained without charge as part of a state
crackdown on journalists. Another un-bylined piece, also written by
Motjuwadi, affirms that, “For 25 years Drum has been saying that if
South Africa were to have a revolution of social conscience and recognise
the brotherhood of Man under the fatherhood of God, there could be no
violence and no threat from foreign powers. For our variety of races and
colours is perhaps our greatest asset.”
mid-June 2016