Heather Hogan
This year’s Media Freedom Day has been celebrated with the launch of a new documentary on the life of deceased journalist Nathaniel “Nat” Nakasa. Commissioned by the South African National Editors’ Forum, Print Media South Africa and the Niemann Society of Southern Africa, and directed by Lauren Groenewald, its title A Native of Nowhere comes directly from Nakasa’s writing.
Such a celebration is made complete with a commemoration of this pioneering journalist who died at the tender age of 28 .
Born in Durban’s Chesterville township in 1939 to one of the first black typesetters in the country, Nakasa became a great lover of literature. When travelling to Johannesburg, Nakasa refused to live in the hostels as was expected of all single black men at the time. He also chose to ignore the city curfew and slept many nights in the watchman’s room at the top of the Drum magazine office block.
Once he wrote: “I shared a theory with a friend who also spent much of his time about town because of the housing problem. We believed that the best way to live with the colour bar in Johannesburg was to ignore it.”
It was virtually impossible for black journalists to obtain press identity cards. With the introduction of the Amended Suppression of Communism Act in 1959, journalists’ hands were tied even tighter; many editors and writers were banned. Nakasa continued to write about increasingly controversial issues. Around him, freedom of the press became a joke, making it impossible to actively condemn apartheid. Many tried to show the evil of apartheid without condemning it but were labelled as sell-outs. It was worse for black journalists who were not only harassed by the white government but accused of soft-soaping the truth by their peers. Those not conforming to government policy were assaulted.
Labelled “a situation”, Nakasa worked tirelessly for Drum magazine, the Golden City Post and the Rand Daily Mail.
Nakasa was resented by his black peers for speaking of reconciliation while they tried to stoke the fires of hatred and anger.
Desmond Tutu once said: “Nat Nakasa was the rainbow man when the rainbow was not allowed.”
After founding the magazine The Classic, Nakasa was awarded a scholarship to study at Harvard University in the United States for a year. The government refused to give him a passport but maintained that if he was determined to go, he would be granted an exit permit and thereby go into voluntary exile. In New York, he joined other exiles, including Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. He thrived on his course but became troubled after he encountered racism in the US too. Able to live with the thought that South Africa was abnormal in its practices, Nakasa was unable to live with the thought that the entire world was the same.
Former Rand Daily Mail editor Allister Sparks recalls: “Soon after he left [Harvard], I started getting messages that he was unhappy, that he was confused . and that he was tormented by the fact that he couldn’t come back to South Africa.”
Confused and deeply disillusioned, Nakasa felt he was doomed to suffer from a mental illness like his mother. One night his friend John Thomson Fairfield received a phone call saying Nakasa was in Harlem talking of suicide. Fairfield rushed to his side and talked with him over a drink for more than an hour. Finally, thinking he had calmed Nakasa down, he left. Later Nakasa lept to his death from one of the high-rise building’s windows. He was buried by his fellow exiles and his brother Moses. Moses Nakasa disappeared immediately afterwards and was never heard from again.
Today Nat Nakasa lies buried only metres from American human rights activist Malcom X. His story remains a tragedy, the tale of a man ahead of his time – a man who died for knowledge, truth and freedom of expression.
Nat Nakasa: A Native of Nowhere will be shown on November 4 at 8.30pm on e.tv