After leaving school, aged seventeen he returned to Durban and after many jobs, two friends helped him find a job a year later as a junior reporter at the "Ilanga Lase Natal", a Zulu language weekly. After his reporting attracted the attention of Sylvester Stein of the "Drum" magazine, he joined the magazine in 1957. He and the other journalists writings at the "Drum" were influenced by the "Suppression of Communism Act, 1950" and had to show the effects of Apartheid indirectly on black lives without condemning it directly for fear of being banned from practising journalism.