SOURCE: Jaggi, Maya. “In the Shadow of Apartheid.” Times Literary Supplement (1 December 1990): 1326.

In the following excerpt, Jaggi provides a favorable assessment of Tales of Tenderness and Power.

The monthly magazine Drum (which began life in Cape Town in 1951 as The African Drum) was one of the first major outlets for black South African writing. Selected from 1950s editions of the magazine, the stories in The Drum Decade range from short fiction by Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alex La Guma, Richard Rive, Bloke Modisane and James Matthews to reportage and testimony (borrowing from story-telling conventions) by Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Henry Nxumalo and Casey Motsisi. Set in the townships of the 1950s, they evoke in particular the vanished ethos of Sophiatown, Johannesburg's vibrant, cosmopolitan free-hold community which the regime bulldozed in 1962 to make way for the white suburb of Triomf.

In the often tough, cynical prose that became a hallmark of...