Zine-Making at the People's History Museum

It was a beautiful, bright and sunny Saturday morning in the bustling city of Manchester when we converged on the People’s History Museum for a zine-making workshop inspired by the South African DRUM magazine of the 1950s and 60s.

In continuation of its annual outreach of activities for the community, the Southern Voices group in conjunction with the South African Modernism 1880-2020 project at the University of Salford, organised a workshop on Zine-making. This workshop invited participants to create zines inspired by DRUM, which was a publication that reported on, and inspired resilience and resistance to, the apartheid regime.

The workshop started with a brief history of the DRUM magazine, then named ‘The African Drum’ by Robert Crisp, a journalist and broadcaster. The magazine was not very successful under Robert. However, the success of the magazine came when Jim Bailey took over as editor and recruited the help of writers and photographers, among whom was Mr. Henry Nxumalo who helped to rebrand and redesign the magazine. The magazine was changed to the DRUM and this rebranding gave the magazine wider reach and appeal. A 1959 article in TIME magazine reports that:

In the teeming Negro and coloured shantytowns of Johannesburg, where newspapers and magazines are a rarity, a truck piled high with magazines rumbled through the unpaved streets last week. Wherever it stopped, hundreds of people swarmed about it, buying the magazine: The African Drum

(‘South African Drumbeats’, TIME Magazine, 1952)

The content of the magazine celebrated urban black culture and was pivotal in producing key members who were involved in birthing African nationalist movements, such as the Pan African Congress that was held in Manchester in 1945. The DRUM readership also extended to other African countries like Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, with about 24,000 copies distributed in these regions.

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The venue of the workshop was the People’s History Museum. Here, my colleague Ume Kalsoom and I provided a brief history of the magazine and a presentation that showed some of the pictures of the founding members of the magazine. We also spoke about the changes in the different samples of the cover and magazine over the years.

We then showed the audience how to make a zine using A3 paper. We had different examples of zines made from previous workshops and provided materials like printed pictures, magazines, scissors, colour ribbons, word makers and much more to help them explore their creativity. We also had lovely music by South African artists like Mariam Makeba playing in the background.

The two hours allocated for the workshop flew fast. Some of the participants wished it lasted longer and were very engaged in making something that they could keep. It made them feel creative and was a way of using creativity to speak to, and support, an important legacy.

One of the participants said the workshop evoked their childhood memories, and another participant said she felt a deeper connection to South Africa (which she had previously visited) after making her zine.