‘Strange things happen when the lights are low’: The South African Night in Drum, 1951–1960

South African historians have largely overlooked the night as a frame of historical analysis. This article is an initial attempt to rectify this by exploring Drum as a source for this endeavour. Drum provides insight into the South African night in the 1950s as both a symbol and experience, predominantly as it was understood and encountered by black South Africans. At this time curfew legislation and the intentional lack of lighting infrastructure provided to black urban areas sought to circumscribe black people’s nighttime activity. The apartheid state’s racial ideology cast black people as fundamentally rural and cut off from modernity, solely allowed in the city to provide labour. In this imagination, black people were seen as city people by day only, and should disappear at night to sleep. Nevertheless, Drum’s predominantly black writers positioned the night as a key site of their reporting and short stories, the site of ‘real life’, depicting a vibrant black urban nightlife. Consequently, Drum offers a catalogue of urban black South Africans’ nighttime activity, occurring despite curfew legislation. In this, Drum challenged the state’s prescribed temporality, insisting on black people’s modernity and urban identity, imaged through their engagement in a life by night. However, Drum juxtaposed its descriptions of this vibrant night with reporting and depictions of nighttime crime predominantly located in African neighbourhoods, challenging the government’s infrastructural neglect that was held to be responsible for the danger of these areas at night. Further, in writing about black urban nightlife, in South Africa and abroad, Drum allowed its predominantly black readers to vicariously experience nighttime activity, facilitating the evasion of the curfew’s curbs on mobility. Here, Drum drew its readers, and placed black South Africa generally, into a globally imagined project of black urban modernity, represented, expressed and experienced through the night. Thus, in their struggle over the night in the 1950s, black South Africans and the apartheid state struggled over black modernity itself.