Description:

In a brief moment of racial mixing and creativity, Sophiatown was one of the few areas where Black South Africans could own their own property. The standard-bearer of the Sophiatown spirit was Drum magazine, and most notably the man who would come to be called “Mr. Drum,” Henry Nxumalo.

Set in Johannesburg's Sophiatown district amid the jazz clubs and bars of 1950s which witnessed South Africa’s equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance, the stories of Reporter Henry Nxumalo, Drum magazine and Sophiatown are woven together. As the story opens Henry is only interested in living the fast life: covering sports, drinking and clowning with his cronies from Drum magazine, romancing a beautiful singer, then slinking home to his wife and kids. When Drum’s editor insists that he do a story on the township crime scene, Henry resists, but ultimately gives in, leading him to become acquainted with a petty gang leader and brutal killer known as Slim whom he knew in passing from his evenings in the Sophiatown shebeens, the illegal township bars that they both frequented. When Henry witnesses Slim kill a man during an incident in a lethal turf war, something inside him seems to shift and he is forced to recognize the violence and internalized brutality that underlies the Sophiatown high life. Henry begins to suggest assignments to his editor. He goes undercover, passing himself off as an ordinary laborer to get inside a Boer farm. Narrowly escaping with his life, he writes an investigative story on slave-like conditions on the farm. When the article hits the stands, the reputation and aura of both Drum and Henry are firmly established. His reputation is secured when he deliberately gets himself put into jail, and then writes about the horrendous conditions there. As time progresses, Henry becomes more and more aware of—and willing to go head-to-head with—the full extent of the institutional racism that was hardening into the full-blown apartheid system. Eventually, he uncovers plans by government authorities to start evicting Blacks, Indians and Coloreds from Sophiatown and is finally targeted as a thorn-in-the-side of a growingly repressive government. African American actor Taye Diggs stars as Henry Nxumalo.