Who Killed Mr Drum?, by Sylvester Stein, (Corvo, £8.99)

Manure of the smelliest kind grows roses of the sweetest musk - and the putrid mulch of sin that was apartheid in South Africa nurtured the most blessed of people.

This is a true story about some of those saints - a gathering of legendary journalists at Drum Magazine in Johannesburg, which remained a beacon of happy-go-lucky defiance against the worst excesses of that bigoted, benighted white regime in the 1950s and 60s.

It is a tragedy spiced with sassy humour as wild and rhythmic as a bongo-beat reflecting a time when kwela jazz powered the people into an ululating jutty-bummed dance of defiance against the tightening grip of a police state. These black cameramen and writers, hip, heroic and hilarious, were moulded by unbearable pressures into the most talented communicators in picture and word of that century.

They deliberately and fearlessly got themselves arrested for "pass" offences - not carrying the papers that entitled them to be outside the township in case of random stops by the police - while trying to expose the hellish conditions in jails.

They "invaded" whites-only Dutch Reformed Churches to pray and be sinned against for all the world to see. And they survived to write the stories or snap the telling pictures.

Yet all were to die - either in loneliness, falling out of high police building windows, alcohol poisoning, unexplained illnesses or, as in the case of chief reporter Henry "Mr Drum" Nxumalo, in a blood-spattered heap in Soweto.

A shorn-off button from a police tunic was later found on the ground nearby.

The story, in which Nxumalo's end is a threaded ribbon of mystery, is told with pace and panache by their puckish white editor, Sylvester Stein, who reaches a conclusion too generalised and obvious to be satisfying but too brutally true to deny.

Mr Drum, and his fellow journalists, were all victims of a lunatic Nazi dream of social engineering which has since, finally and thankfully, been vanquished.

Updated: 09:41 Wednesday, August 20, 2003