Published this month by University of Michigan Press, Out for Glamour in Africa: A History of Black Urban Femininities in Drum Magazine by Wanjirũ G. Mbure is a richly researched excavation of how Black women shaped, and were shaped by, one of Africa’s most influential publications during the era of independence. The book’s central move is to treat Drum‘s cover girls, columnists, and readers not as passive subjects of a magazine’s gaze, but as active architects of a new kind of Black femininity, one built in real time through fashion, politics, and print.

Mbure coins the term “femme urbAfricana” to describe this model of womanhood as it took shape across Drum‘s pages: urban, politically engaged, fashion-forward, paradoxically both Afrocentric and heteronormative, and distinctly transnational in its reach. Rather than confining her analysis to Drum‘s well-known South African edition, Mbure pairs it deliberately with its lesser-studied East and West African editions, tracing how the same magazine produced different, interconnected versions of Black glamour across the continent and beyond. Drawing on an expansive archive, cover photography, advertisements, editorial columns, and reader letters, she reconstructs how women from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States collectively produced a new visual and political language of Black urban womanhood.

The five chapters move through this history with real specificity: from the early “Architects of Femme UrbAfricana” and the magazine’s “African Sirens,” through its “Commodity Queens” and the globalizing pull of femme urbAfricana’s reach, to a final chapter on “Freedom Beauties” that ties the whole arc back to independence-era politics. Throughout, Mbure insists on a central argument that reframes how this period of African media history gets told: that Black women were not merely represented within the post-independence nationalist project, they were co-creators of it.

The book has already drawn strong praise from scholars working at the intersections of Black, gender, and media studies. Tsitsi Jaji of Duke University calls it “an exhilarating read” that reveals Drum‘s truly transnational character, while Hilary Jones of the University of Kentucky credits the book with filling a real gap in postcolonial African history by centering African women’s subjectivities. Corinne Sandwith of the University of Pretoria describes it as an innovative study that moves beyond narratives of Black erasure to investigate glamour itself as a force in shaping urban femininity.

Mbure is Associate Professor of English and Film & Media Studies and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Culture & Faculty Development at William & Mary. Out for Glamour in Africa is her first book, and it arrives as a genuinely significant addition to the growing body of scholarship reexamining African women’s roles in shaping twentieth-century media and political life.

Out for Glamour in Africa is available in paperback ($34.95) and hardcover ($100.00) via press.umich.edu.