Ryan Brown - A Native of Nowhere: The Life of Nat Nakasa

First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2013

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Ryan Brown, 2013

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4314-0534-3

Also available as an e-book

d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-0535-0

ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-0536-7

mobi ISBN 978-1-4314-0537-4

Cover design publicide

Set in Ehrhardt 12/16pt

Job No. 002049

See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

For the Nakasa family, who have taught me more about South Africa past and present than anyone else

Index

O N A WARM JULY MORNING IN 1965, the South African writer Nat Nakasa stood facing the window of a friends seventh-floor apartment in Central Park West. In the distance he could likely just make out the outline of the Empire State Building, a sharp reminder of just how far he was from home. Less than a year earlier, Nat had taken an exit permit from the apartheid government a one-way ticket out of the country of his birth and come to Harvard University on a journalism fellowship. Now he was caught in a precarious limbo, unable to return to South Africa but lacking citizenship in the United States, a place that he was beginning to feel offered little respite from the brutal racism of his own country. He was, he wrote, a native of nowhere a stateless man [and] a permanent wanderer, and he was running out of hope. Standing in that New York City apartment building, he faced the alien city. The next thing anyone knew, he was lying on the pavement below. He was 28 years old.

Nats death stunned a wide circle of writers and artists Particularly jarring to Hugh and others close to Nat was that his death came on the heels of a brisk and markedly successful career. In the decade preceding his suicide, he had risen to become a senior writer for South Africas most circulated black news magazine, served as the first black columnist at a prominent white newspaper, and founded a literary journal to showcase African writing. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, he had been published in the New York Times and offered a scholarship to hone his craft in the Ivy League. But as for so many South Africans of his generation, leaving his homeland was not simply a matter of deciding to go. It was also a matter of deciding never to come back. Not yet 30 years old, Nat had to look into his future and decide that being legally barred from his homeland was a price worth paying to see the world beyond its borders.

This book tells the story of that short life. In doing so, it seeks in part to answer the troubling question of how Nat found himself in that New York City window in July 1965, desperate to the point of no return. But life, like history, cannot be read backwards, and so any biography of Nat Nakasa must begin with the acknowledgement that he was no simple martyr, no fallen hero of the anti-apartheid cause, but rather an ambitious, talented and flawed man whose life had the cold fortune of colliding with one of the most racially repressive regimes in the modern world.

At its most basic level, this book tells the story of how a quiet, serious African boy growing up in the sleepy coastal city of Durban in the 1940s became part of the generation of outspoken black South African journalists in the 1950s and 1960s who challenged state-sponsored segregation in that way that only writers can, simply by keeping a detailed record of its existence. In doing so, this story provides an alternative way of thinking about early resistance to apartheid, loosing it from the bonds of the organised opposition movement. For a man like Nat, freedom was not the end point of a long struggle arching toward justice. Rather it was something you took for yourself, day in and day out one conversation, one interview, one multiracial party at a time.

Moving in a world where liberation and personal ambition were tightly bound, he spent his life seizing news stories, women and literary prestige in South Africa simply because as a talented and educated man, he saw no reason why he should not have them. He did not live on the perch of rigid principle, but rather with the seemingly endless confidence of someone who thought everything he wanted should be his, oppression and racism be damned. That way of thinking pushed him through mid-twentieth-century South Africa on a path as winding and riddled with contradictions as that of the country itself. And ultimately, it led him to the damning choice to leave it all behind.

But more than that perhaps, Nat Nakasas story is a story of what happens when a human life, small and short and ordinary, finds itself placed against the backdrop of a tumultuous period in history, a period of brutal racism and state-sponsored discrimination, a period that forced hard choices and courageous actions. Nats life was forever knotted to the reality that he was a black man in twentieth-century South Africa, a fact that no rebellion, no blithe disregard for the system, could ever eliminate. And that larger story is one shot through with betrayal, a tale of dispossessed dreams and downward mobility of the kind that stalked so many black lives in apartheid South Africa.

In the 1930s, Nats father was a writer who brushed shoulders with Durbans liberal elite and sent his children to private mission schools to groom them for a middle-class future. Those children came of age, however, at a moment when South Africas long history of segregation was beginning to cohere into a more systematic and meticulous brand of racial hierarchy. The two, including Nat, who managed to go abroad to continue their education did not survive exile, and the other three scattered across the black townships of South Africa, their prospects increasingly dictated by race and poverty. By the time I met Nats sister, Gladys, his only surviving sibling, in 2011, she occupied a rumpled two-room government-issued house on the outer edge of a Durban township. As an icy twilight descended over the unheated home, she showed me the mat her son laid out on the concrete floor to sleep on each night. We waited many years for this place, she said.

To be sure, then, this is also a story of the scars that apartheid left on those it touched, and in particular on one young journalist with ambitions taller than his race was allowed. But oppression, however terrible, is never all there is to a persons existence. Indeed, for all of the boundaries apartheid created If that were true, as he rightly notes, any black person could stand in for all black people in telling the stories of South African history. But Nat Nakasa is not Nelson Mandela. He is not Steve Biko and he is not Oliver Tambo. His life is built from its own particulars. Its sensibility, its stories, its ending, are all its own.

Americans who study South Africa must all at some point or other contend with a simple question: why? What is it that pulls us to this distant country at the bottom of the world? I found my answer on a cool autumn night in 2010, as I was walking across the campus of the University of North Carolina with Hugh Masekela. Did Nat ever speak to you about his mother? I asked him suddenly. She was a frail woman who had spent most of his childhood severely mentally ill and I was intensely curious about her.

No, Hugh said tersely. We didnt have that kind of relationship.