Word: drum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...lives frugally on his retired sailor's pension, and is known as a soft touch for almost any countryman who passes his door with a hard-luck story. He drops in at Sonny Griswold's American Bar in Port-au-Prince' occasionally for a rum-and-drum session with visiting U.S. bluejackets. He paints and sketches reads and talks with tourists and others who come to him for voodoo information.-Oldtimers have estimated that Doc has 10,000 Haitian friends. When asked if he ever thinks of going back to Utah, he says: "Why should...
...first came after it investigated the vast potato and corn farms 100 miles east of Johannesburg, where convicts and contract laborers were hired by white farmers. The farmers had been accused of fierce brutality, but had been cleared by the Malan government. Drum dressed one of its staffers in rags, got him on to the farms, later slipped in a photographer...
...When Drum published its illustrated expose (see cut), it touched off a roar of protest round the world. The British government sent a special investigator, and the respected South African Institute of Race Relations confirmed Drum's charges with its own survey. The protests forced the reluctant government to make some reforms. Drum dug up other similar stories such as a series on wealthy wine farmers who paid their non-white laborers partly in wine, thus kept them in a state of uncomplaining drunkenness. It followed up with articles on education, child care, home building and hygiene...
Witch Doctors & Suspicions. Drum had to fight hostility and suspicion not only from the government but also from its readers; they could not believe that any magazine backed by whites was up to any good. Drum is still occasionally criticized by readers. Once when it charged that some witch doctors were encouraging tribal ritual murder, the editors had to placate a delegation of seven witch doctors who went to Drum's editorial office in full raiment to protest strongly the "slur on a noble profession...
...Drum has never overcome the government's hostility, but it long ago conquered the suspicions of its Negro and colored readers. It is also regarded with approval by many anti-Malan whites in South Africa. Summed up one white: "Drum makes South Africa's segregated, despised non-whites feel like people...