THIS book starts with the end of a brilliant South African writer’s life. Nat Nakasa, a native of nowhere as he described himself, ended his exiled existence one July morning in 1965 when he jumped from the window of a New York City apartment building. He was 28.
It has always been assumed that the reasons for his death were pretty straightforward. He’d left South Africa on an exit permit, which meant he would not be returning home — by edict of the apartheid regime.
He was, he wrote, "a stateless man, a permanent wanderer". And as his American visa was coming to an end, he was running out of hope.
Born and raised in Cato Ridge, near Durban, the journalist, whose writing was part of Drum magazine’s success, was in the US on the prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.
He had developed a high profile in a short time for his work and had already appeared in US newspapers and magazines.
Details
- TITLE: A Native of Nowhere: The Life of Nat Nakasa
- AUTHOR: Ryan Brown
- PUBLISHER: Jacana
He spoke at events. People flocked to listen to "this sort of mascot who had come to represent all black South Africans. He was called on repeatedly to comment on the terrible situation back home," says the American author and historian Ryan Brown. She was in Johannesburg recently to launch her beautifully written, evocative and powerful book on Nakasa.
For many people a celebrity status might represent the start of a promising new life. And initially for Nakasa the newfound freedom to write and say what he wished was exhilarating, as was attested to by several of his compatriots such as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba.
But, according to Brown, he quickly came to realise that the US was not as free of deep racial divisions as he had hoped.
It was hard for him to navigate the complicated brand of racism that he found there. "They have the same problems here but they just want to gawk at me, this foreigner from a distant oppressive land," wrote Nakasa. His mood darkened as his sense of alienation increased, and one South African fellow journalist, Harry Mashabela, told Brown "that he was just floored by how humourless and bitter Nat was compared with his jauntiness in opposing the oppression back home".
Another factor weighing on Nakasa, says Brown, was his complex family history.
His mother had suffered some sort of mental breakdown when Nakasa and his siblings were young, resulting in her being institutionalised.
"Nat, who was one of five, was raised primarily by his father who came from the generation of missionary-educated Africans, and his older brothers."
He did not complete his schooling, but his middle class family background resulted in his developing into a brilliant young writer. When he and his close Durban friend, the acclaimed author Lewis Nkosi, arrived to work at Drum they were shocked at the hard-drinking lifestyle of the magazine’s journalists.
"For that reason they never quite became the same as the Joburg boys," says Brown.
They lived in "fringe country" a term that Nakasa coined in the early 1960s, "in a world that straddled black and white communities, going to multiracial parties held by inter alia the Slovos, Helen Suzman’s daughters and Nadine Gordimer".
Those Johannesburg suburban homes witnessed a fascinating mix of white and black intellectuals from the left, swimming, playing tennis and avidly discussing the darkening future of SA. "That was the world that Nat wanted, both physically and intellectually, to remain in for as long as he could. He didn’t want to live in the townships and slept at friends’ homes or in the Drum offices," says Brown.
Nkosi and Nakasa even managed to live in the cosmopolitan and transgressive Hillbrow, until their landlord kicked them out because they had advertised for a white domestic worker.
"Their way of dealing with apartheid was to make dark jokes about it, going into whites-only coffee bars and striking up intense discussions with the owners, by the end of which they had finished their drinks," says Brown.
But as their close Drum friends such as Can Themba and Todd Matshikiza began to leave the country, unable to write and operate freely under increasingly draconian laws, so Nakasa too felt stifled.
The security police had been watching him for many years and, as he realised that SA was becoming too dangerous and depressing to continue in, he was offered a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard.
He had been writing a weekly column, the first black writer to do so, at the Rand Daily Mail, and both his editor, Allister Sparks, and his great friend and mentor, Nadine Gordimer, urged him to take it.
Nakasa did not know it but there was an unsigned banning order lying in the file the police kept on him. Brown, who came to South Africa on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011 to study history and journalism, managed to get hold of it, by filing a freedom of information request with the FBI.
It was the author’s decision to study South African history, taught through biographies and autobiographies, at the US’s Duke University, that stirred her interest in Nakasa.
"He has long lurked on the fringes of South African historiography, never playing more than a bit part in the studies of early apartheid-era journalism, literature and intellectual culture," says Brown.
She believes that his life has been overshadowed by the potent symbolism of his death and that he has been remembered, "in a vapid, shallow way as the symbol of destruction wrought on the black intellectual community by the apartheid government".
People like Nakasa had instead "led sprawling, intricate, contradictory lives that resist an easy kind of categorisation". And she emphasises that lives are not less valuable for being short.
"This young man accomplished a staggering amount."
One of Nakasa’s legacies is the literary magazine, The Classic, which he established in 1962.
For two years it attracted an international cadre of writers, subscribers and funders.
But as the National Party’s rule tightened, particularly in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, and state censorship set about snuffing out black literary expression, so the very act of writing became its own form of protest activity. Ryan Brown, named after an American television hero, says there has been some conjecture that, on the night he died, Nakasa may have learnt that The Classic was funded by the CIA, which might have prompted his suicide. "I’m not sure where I stand on that actually," she says. "When I started this project I thought his suicide was a closed case."
But as she delved deeper into his life and met many people including Gladys Nakasa, his sister, "I realised that for many, this is simply not the truth".
And so, for some, the mystery that infuses Nakasa’s life and death continues.
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