Dear Dolly

Dear Dolly, I am 20 and single, and have been accused by a neighbour of being in love with his 19-year-old wife. Her husband has even threatened to kill me. But the accusation is false. Now his wife has suggested to me that we fall in love so that I can at least be accused of something true. Should I follow her suggestion?

That's a letter to Dolly, the advice columnist for Drum magazine, circa February 1955. I found that letter in a book Katie's checked out of the UCT library for her thesis. She's writing about Drum, though on more weighty topics than its advice column.

But this book, called Dear Dolly, is priceless. It features the best exchanges between Dolly and her readers spanning a period of nearly 30 years.

Katie tells me that there wasn't a Dolly at all... or that the one Dolly who ever worked at Drum, a Dolly Kassim, wasn't ever the person writing it. They picked the name because there was a famous South African singer at the time of the magazine's founding named Dolly Rathebe, and they were trying to cash in on her name.

The person stuck with writing the column every month would rotate, at least in the fifties, which is the era that Katie is researching. The staff writers--nearly all of them being among the best, most literate, most cultured South African journalists working in the era--hated writing the column, so they would fight over who had to do the job.

The questions, and the answers, reveal a lot about the issues facing South Africans at the time. The ones collected in the book, of course, are the more outrageous letters, usually because of what they reveal about how traditional African culture was clashing with the newly urbanized, increasingly more sophisticated world of black South Africa. And THAT--the idea that Drum both celebrated, and helped create, the emerging urban culture--is actually the topic of Katie's thesis.

So expect a few letters to "Dolly" in this space on Fridays for the next several weeks.

For now, I'll end with Dolly's response to the letter I shared with you above:

You will only get yourself into real trouble if you follow this stupid advice. Leave her alone! Keep the company of a decent and single young woman and the husband will realise his mistake.

Words to live by.