The story of Drum magazine
The Treason Trial 1956
February 1957 cover. Cover image: Jurgen Schadeberg
The Treason Trial was a trial in which 156 people (105 Blacks, 21 Indians, 23 Whites and 7 Coloureds), including Nelson Mandela, were arrested in a raid and accused of treason in South Africa in 1956.
"The treason trials, now the talk of South Africa and the world at large, started with a bang-bang-bang. There was drama ...."
Scores of diplomats, politicians, libertarians, legal toffs and news correspondents from around the world flew in to be observers of this latest showpiece of the Nationalists and of course Drum was in close attendance too
The spread showing all the 156 accused.
The team devoted much of the issue to it, including the centre-spread on which were featured thumbnail portraits with captions, of each and every one of the 156 defendants. Technically this was the way for a news-picture magazine to handle such a situation typographically; it was a demonstration of one aspect of what Sylvester had been making a study of. The pictures are there to be read, as it were, not as mere illustrations that the eyes skim.
The trial lasted until 1961, when all of the defendants were found not guilty.