Coherent Digital and Sabinet today announced that they have located issues of DRUM magazine long thought to be missing. The company will add them to the Black South African Magazines online collection, creating the only digitized full run of DRUM.

Black South African Magazines is a rare digital collection of magazines that were created by Black Africans for Black Africans during the 20th century. The publications date from 1937 to 1973. It's part of Coherent Digital's Africa Commons, an effort to preserve and disseminate Africa's endangered cultural heritage.

DRUM has particular historical significance within the overall collection. Once the most widely read magazine in Africa (distributed in eight African countries), its journalists influenced political outcomes and are credited with changing the way Black South Africans were represented in society. It chronicled township life under apartheid from a Black perspective, covering the Defiance Campaign, the massacre at Sharpeville, the emergence of Black Jazz, and other historical and cultural milestones.

"Our Africa-based publishing partner Sabinet has sourced the missing DRUM issues from the National Library of South Africa in Pretoria," says Elizabeth Robey, Coherent's senior editor for the project. "They are extremely fragile."

DRUM was also a platform for the emergence of a new generation of Black African writers and photographers. Represented are Es'kia Mphahlele, a founding figure of modern African literature and the Father of African Humanism, whose books were banned by the apartheid government; Peter Abrahams, one of South Africa's most prominent political writers; Alex La Guma, a novelist, anti-apartheid activist, and political prisoner; the internationally acclaimed photographer Peter Magubane, who was repeatedly imprisoned for capturing events such as the Sharpeville Massacre funeral, the Soweto uprisings, and the Winnie Mandela prison protests; and many other prominent journalists.

With all sourcing and digitization to take place in Africa, Coherent is currently processing these items, and by early 2024 all issues from 1951 through 1973 will be available online in their entirety; all the investigative journalism, photography, fiction, reviews, biographies, fashion, lifestyle articles, and advertisements will be accessible.

Black South African Magazines is live on the Africa Commons platform alongside other modules, including History and Culture and Southern African Films and Documentaries, with The Hilary Ng'weno Archive to be added later this year. Users can cross-search the modules. Individual modules and a package including all four modules are available through perpetual purchase or annual subscription. Trials are available.

About Coherent Digital

Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, and others. Today, the scholarly record is incomplete, missing critical research materials that are currently wild—undiscoverable, uncatalogued, uncitable, and unstable. At Coherent Digital, we curate, capture, enrich, and make wild content available to scholars on our award-winning Commons platforms. We focus on grey literature, regional content, primary sources, and learning objects.