About Drum Archive
Who We Are
The Drum Archive is a comprehensive collection of African photography and journalism spanning 1951–1986. It includes five editions of Drum, alongside related titles such as Golden City Post, True Love, and Trust.
This website hosts the Drum Archive’s digital collection (formerly the Bailey’s African History Archive) which is being expanded and refined over time as we digitise the physical archive. It is intended as a public resource for students, researchers, artists, and wider audiences – supporting discovery, study, and responsible reuse of historical material.
Across its formative decades (c.1951–1986), Drum magazine built an influential photographic and editorial record of Apartheid in South Africa and Independence across Anglophone Africa. Published in multiple editions, Drum Magazine delivered serious content in a “sweetie-wrapper of sport, sex and scandal” – while also tracing newly urbanised, Black cultural life across Southern Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. True to its early claim, Drum positioned itself as “A Magazine of Africa, for Africa.”
It nurtured the talents of a generation of Black journalists and photographers such as Casey Motsisi, Todd Matshikiza, Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Es’kia Mphahlele, Arthur Maimane, Bessie Head, Juby Mayet, Henry Ofori, Cameron Duodu, Nelson Ottah, Cyprian Ekwensi, Peter Magubane, Ernest Cole, Bob Gosani, Alf Kumalo, Ranjith Kally, Gopal Naransamy, G.R. Naidoo, James Barnor, Matthew Faji, Mohamed Amin, Joseph Taro, amongst others.
Use this site to explore digitised photographs, articles, and advertisements, and to learn more about our photographers and our content through themed collections. Clear pathways are provided for research access and rights-managed licensing.
For exhibitions, museum programming, and curatorial collaborations, please contact the archive directly.
Drum enabled us to summon up from the spirit world writers and photographers, dancers and cover-girls, politicians and yes, martyrs in the cause of human freedom: at least recorded them, sometimes we did a lot more than that.
Partners
Africa Media Online
Coherent Digital / Africa Commons
Coherent Digital is a digital publishing and archives platform. Through its Africa Commons initiative, it works with partners to preserve, digitise, and disseminate African cultural heritage for libraries and institutions worldwide. This is the pathway for institutional licensing and access to the digitised magazine corpus.
Drum Archive Shop
The Drum Archive Shop is the archive’s public-facing retail platform, translating iconic images into objects – posters, printed matter, and merchandise – so the collection remains visible, legible, and in circulation beyond the reading room.
Peffers Fine Art
Photography Legacy Project (PLP)
PLP is an initiative focused on photographic archives and the legacies of African photographers. In partnership with the Drum Archive, PLP has supported selection, digitisation, and metadata development to help present substantial bodies of work for education and research.
UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP)
The Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) is a UCLA Library initiative that supports the digitisation and safeguarding of at-risk modern archives worldwide. We acknowledge MEAP’s support in helping advance the preservation, digitisation, and public accessibility of material from the Drum Archive as part of the Bailey History Archive project.
