The unattainable "betterlife" : the discourses of the homogenised South African black emerging middle-class lifestyle in Drum magazine

Drum and YOU are two general interest magazines which share the same publisher, language (English), format, and are compiled by many of the same journalists and editors. The greatest distinction between the two publications is that Drum is aimed at a specifically black readership while YOU caters for a general, cosmopolitan South African readership. With various commonalities in the production of Drum and YOU, what do the differing commodities, discourses and cultural repertoires presented in Drum in comparison to YOU communicate about the conceived black audience/s by the magazines'producers? In contrast to the dominant body of research on Drum magazine, which has been dedicated to pre-1994 editions, the investigation undertaken in this research focuses on post-apartheid editions of Drum under the commercial ownership of Media24. This also provides a unique opportunity to compare and contrast Drum and YOU which has not been extensively explored in the past. A theoretical study on some of the credible, plausible discourses circulating in Drum drew from Laden's (1997; 2003) research on black South African middle-class magazines and Steyn's (2001) studies on narratives of whiteness including colonial and apartheid policy discourses. Other theory considered to identify types of discourses included those on self-stylisation, excorporation and the historic, cultural influence of Drum in black South African identity formation. Critical discourse analysis is employed to discern the distinction and boundaries between the conceived black middle-class readerships of Drum and YOU. A multifarious content is present in Drum magazine for the diverse post-apartheid black middle-class of South Africa. Discourses of the African traditional and conservative feature side-by-side with contemporary, liberal and Western discourses; while the cultural repertoires of the bourgeois middle-class are presented beside the more modest commodities of the lower-income working class. This communicates an increasingly integrated South African consumer culture and a willing bourgeois solidarity amongst middle-class groups, creating a larger consumer class for advertisers and marketers in South Africa. In comparison to YOU, the discourses of the conservative-African-traditional provide a distinctive feature of Drum. However, this discourse is limited to realms which do not threaten the prevailing magazine culture of consumerism and the dominant global culture of Western science and reason. The other great distinction from YOU is Drum’s prominent educating and didactic function, offering an aspirant lifestyle by marketing a range of Western technologies and commodities. This is in addition to suggesting options for desirable social conduct and socially-responsible behavior