Bona, Barometer of the Decades (Report‪)‬

Bona magazine usually receives a bad press in relation to Drum. In the 1950s Drum was seen to be independent of apartheid-State interference; Bona was depicted as subservient to the State's ideology. Drum was regarded as opposing the then prime minister Verwoerd's retribalising policies by depicting the new urban African voice; Bona was seen as less challenging, or defiant, in its city depictions. Such stark oppositions are a simplification. Both magazines turned to what can be summarised as soccer, sex and sin. Political observation was neither the main concern of Bona nor Drum. It is undeniable, nevertheless, that Drum was the bolder magazine. (See Chapman, 1989, for an overview ofthe 'Drum' decade.) What I argue is that Bona--more so than Drum--captured the 'reality' of its decade: the suppressions as well as the fragile opportunities. Bona may be allowed to speak as a barometer of the decades from the 1950s of apartheid, through the 1980s and the 1990s, to us today. I argue, further, that such an analysis may be conducted within the framework of descriptive translation studies (DTS). Unlike traditional theories of translation, which prescribe what should be done, descriptive translation is concerned primarily with how translations have been done in a practice. Whereas prescriptive approaches are heavily indebted to the linguistic sciences, the DTS model is more attuned to the cultural scene. I am implying congruence, therefore, between the linguistic and the literary pursuit. Two key elements of DTS are omission and substitution: that is, what gets left out, what gets changed. I apply this to the translation from the English-language versions to the isiZulu versions of Bona, a magazine which, like Drum, appears in both English and African languages. The broad argument is that while devices of omission and substitution allowed for kinds of self-censorship, particularly in apartheid times, the strategies adapted themselves to changing political circumstances, signalling what we sometimes wish to ignore in our dealings with Drum: that the weekly or monthly magazine usually was and has remained less innovative, more confirming of, or even conforming to, popular-conservative opinion. (See Baker 1992, for discussions of DTS)