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ABSTRACT
This article compares changing imaginations of African nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the black diaspora through the lens of literary genre in two popular magazines, South Africa's Drum and its lesser-known contemporary from the Central African Federation, African Parade. As traveling literary systems that contain a variety of literary forms, popular magazines are useful for theorizing new relationships between genre and geography. In particular, I consider African Parade's use of interstitial "migrant forms" to map the simultaneously urban and rural, national and transnational contours of the federation. Migration is a thematic as well as a formal feature of these texts, which reconfigure narratives of permanent settlement in the city-a type of story that was popular in Drum and epitomized by the figure of the deterritorialized gangster, or tsotsi. By recasting the migrant as a figure who travels across categories (rural/urban, past/present, traditional/modern), African Parade expressed an alternative vision of the region's shifting geographies and left a lasting impact on its literary forms.
African Parade magazine, published out of the former Central African Federa- tion beginning in 1953, is full of stories of travel and migration by every conceivable means: foot, car, bus, train, plane, and even rocket-ship.1 Such narratives helped to imagine the space of the nascent federation-which was formed, in the same year Parade began, out of the British territories of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia and the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia-in relation to the surrounding region, continent, and wider black diaspora. Migration was a way of life for many Africans in the federation, who travelled in search of work to white farms in Southern Rhodesia, the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, as well as to South Africa's cities and diamond and gold mines. Others sought educa- tional opportunities in East and South African universities such as Makerere and Fort Hare. A smaller number-including some of Parade's editors and writers- journeyed overseas to the United Kingdom and United States.
Through its eclectic forms in five regional languages (English, Nyanja, Shona, Ndebele, and Bemba), Parade depicted the migrant experience as a foundational, constant, and yet deeply varied aspect of African life. Within the covers of a single issue from June 1956, for example, we find a story arguably typical of the moral degradation associated with migration to...