1. Peter Magubane (left) started with Drum in 1954 as a driver- messenger; he often drove the Drum team. Soon he began to carry a camera with him on these assignments, taking photographs that showed great promise and drew the attention of the editors. Within a few years Peter became top Drum photographer, winning many prizes and awards. 

Jurgen Schadeberg was born in Berlin in 1931 and emigrated to South Africa in 1950. Jurgen joined Drum as the first photographer and the fourth member of the Drum staff in July 1951. He covered the Bethal story - the first Drum exposure - with Henry Nxumalo and in April he covered the Defiance Campaign. As Drum grew rapidly, Jurgen became more and more involved with picture editing and with teaching young blacks photography. 

Bob Gosani (right) was a lanky, inarticulate 17-year-old who began his sentences with: 'The thing is'. As a telephone operator or jour- nalist he was hopeless, but then he started to help Jurgen Schade- berg cutting up negatives and working in the darkroom. He took to photography quickly and soon produced photographs of exception- ally high standard about township life. 

2. Henry 'Mr Drum' Nxumalo began to write poems, some of which were published in The Bantu World, when he was working for a boiler maker's shop. During the Second World War Henry went north as a sergeant in the Army. In 1951 he joined Drum as the sports editor. Henry, the original 'Mr Drum', did his first investigative story by exposing farm labour conditions in the potato district of Bethal. After the Bethal exposure Henry had himself arrested under the curfew regulations, and served five days in prison writing a chilling story of prison conditions. Henry was murdered in 1957 while investigating an abortion scandal.  

3. Anthony Sampson was the Drum editor who put Drum on its feet. Educated at Westminster School in London and at Oxford Uni- versity, he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Anthony joined Drum as circulation manager in 1951. At the age of twenty-five he earned £40 a month, and became editor a few months later. He possessed about the best creative brain Drum ever had. After a highly successful few years he moved to Fleet Street where he became one of the top names in his field.  

4. Dorsay Can Themba was born on 21 June 1924 into a family of four. His parents struggled to find money to feed and educate them all. 'But I was lucky,' said Can. I was the first boy to be awarded the Mendi Scholarship to Fort Hare. It was a wonderful help.' After college he taught English and in his spare time read, wrote and studied for a degree in Political Philosophy. After 1952 Can was launched into journalism when he won a short story competition in Drum. He quit teaching and joined Drum as a writer. Can later became assistant editor of Drum. In 1962, Can von Themba, as he enjoyed calling himself, went back to teaching near Manzini in Swaziland. Then he was banned by the South African government, despite the fact that he was the most moderate of men. In September 1967, Can Themba died from coronary thrombosis while reading the newspaper in bed.  

5. Sylvester Stein was Drum editor from 1954 to 1957, at a time when Drum writers and photographers were maybe at their most creative. Sylvester had a nose for good stories and it was during his editorship that 'Mr Drum' went to church, investigating apartheid in religion,  and  the  Olympic  boycott  was  suggested  by  Drum. Sylvester came from Durban, where he was a post office engineer, a taxi driver and a naval officer during the war.

After the war, Sylvester was an actor in London's West End. Back in South Africa he became parliamentary correspondent for the Rand Daily Mail and then the editor of Drum. Sylvester wrote a few books, one of which, 2nd Class Taxi, was very successful. He is now the fastest man in the world over the age of sixty in the 100 metres.  

6. G R Naidoo left his job as a clerk in a labour leader's office in Durban to work for Drum as the Natal correspondent. G R handled Durban's gangsters with superb panache. If you don't give me the whole story . . . the other gang will!' G R then went to East Africa to establish a Drum office in Nairobi. On his return to Durban, he worked for Drum exclusively, risking his life to get an on-the-spot story of the riots in Cato Manor. He was saved from mob-violence by someone recognising him as a man from Drum. He later became editor of Drum. G R was also an outstanding photographer.  

7. Ezekiel Mphahlele 'Zeke, and ye shall find; ask and ye shall be given.' Zeke Mphahlele started off as a teacher in Natal but clashed with the Bantu Education Policy in 1952 and became Drum's literary editor, publishing many short stories. He was awarded his MA for a thesis on black characters in South African literature. Together with his wife Rebecca and five children he wandered around the world as Professor of English; and after Lagos, Nairobi, Paris and Denver, he returned home to hold the Chair of African Lit- erature at the University of the Witwatersrand. 

8. J R A Bailey, a Battle of Britain fighter pilot and Africa's first pub-lishing tycoon. 1950, fresh from Oxford, Bailey fled the foppishness of Imperial England to Cape Town, where he took control of a new magazine that would sell across the face of Africa. 'We must remember that by the late Fifties we were at the same time running four other vibrant editions of Drum: the Nigerian Drum with twenty-two offices across the most populous country in Africa; the Ghana Drum; the East African Drum and the Central African Drum.  At its height, Drum enjoyed a circulation throughout Africa of over 400 000, with around twenty readers per copy - a great mass educator.  

9. Sir Tom Hopkinson edited the British magazine Ulliput and later Picture Post. After ten years on Picture Post he was dismissed for trying to publish Bert Hardy and James Cameron's story on the treatment of political prisoners by the South Koreans. Tom Hopkinson joined Drum after the collapse of Picture Post. He brought with him his impeccable standards of journalism and a beautiful understanding of photography. After leaving Drum he ran the International Press Institute, a school for journalists across Africa, and was later knighted.  

 10. Nathaniel Nakasa began his career in journalism at the llanga Lase Natal. He was then invited to write for Drum, Johannesburg. Nat slipped easily into the artistic-intellectual set of Hillbrow. He mixed with the high, the middle, and the low. With the help of world- famous novelist, Nadine Gordimer, Nat launched The Classic, a literary magazine. He was the first black to write a weekly column for the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail. Nat was awarded a scholarship to Harvard but was refused a passport. After serious consideration he made the decision to go, accepting exile as the price of living in the open world. After a year at Harvard he wrote extensively for several newspapers and magazines in America. Early in the morning of 14 July 1965, a bitterly depressed and homesick Nat Nakasa plunged seven floors to his death in New York.