Allister Sparks
Nat Nakasa was one of the finest columnists ever to write for the South African media. He wrote for several publications, including a literary journal he founded himself, but he reached his widest audience and did his best work with a weekly column in the Rand Daily Mail in the early 1960s.
It was I who recruited him to write for the “Mail.” It was there that I watched him reach the apex of his career. I admired him greatly. We became close friends. He was a frequent visitor to my home, often staying overnight, which was illegal in those dark apartheid days. And then I sent him to his death.
Nat came home from the US last month. At least his earthly remains did. His spirit lives on in the memories of many. Not least my own, where the pleasure of having known him mingles with a deep sense of regret, even guilt, for having been the cause of his having left these fatal shores never to return.
Nat died of a broken heart. It broke because he left this country on an exit permit, which meant he couldn’t return. This talented young black man loved this country despite apartheid. He loved it because it was HIS country; he loved it in all its physical beauty and inhuman ugliness; because he knew it, he understood its people, all of them, and because he could communicate with them in a way few have ever been able to across the colour line. That is what inspired him, gave him life. He didn’t want to go. But I persuaded him to. Because he was so talented. I thought he would flower in freedom. Instead he died.
He died of frustration and disillusionment. He was disillusioned because he didn’t find freedom in the US as he had expected; he found racism instead, something he had thought was uniquely evil to South Africa. I don’t know how this worked on his conflicted emotions, for by then I had lost contact with him. Was it disillusionment with the whole human race? Was it the unspeakable thought that racism was endemic everywhere and that he, the committed nonracialist, was somehow the odd one out, that broke his spirit and left him unable to cope with the evil?
Whatever his thoughts, he must have felt driven to despair. I received a telegram from him, sent from a post office in New York, saying: “Please phone urgently.” But there was no phone number. No address. I phoned the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, where he had spent a year studying on a scholarship. But no one there knew where he was. There was no way I could contact him.
Two days after sending that telegram Nat leaped to his death from the seventh floor window of a New York apartment building. He was just 28 years old.
Nat was buried at a simple ceremony, attended by members of his family, at Firncliff cemetery in upstate New York. Now, 49 years later, after months of painstaking international negotiations in which Gail Gerhard, a distinguished American academic and former fellow student of Nat’s at Harvard, has played a pivotal role, his body has come home for reburial – free at last in the new South Africa from the racism he could not escape in life.
The reburial ceremony will take place on Saturday at his childhood home, Chatsworth, a township outside Durban. I shall be there to honour his memory and to beg his forgiveness.
At the funeral Nat will no doubt be lauded as a hero of the Struggle, one who gave his life for the great cause of black liberation. Indeed he was, and did, but not in the cliched sense that has now become fashionable in the politicising of our history. He was an influential writer, but not a Struggle writer in the conventional sense. He was not angry enough for that.
Indeed Nat was an anomalous figure in the South Africa of the 1960s. He was a black liberal, committed to nonracialism at a time when the apartheid regime was cracking down hardest on all black resistance movements, and black people were responding in kind by flocking behind the militant Black Consciousness movement that spurned collaboration with white liberals. “Black man you are on your own,” was the slogan.
The result was that many of Nat’s fellow black writers held him in a degree of disdain. He mixed with them and partied with them in the boisterous world of black journalism, but he was not really one of them. His writing didn’t contain the sting of bitterness that they felt the intolerable conditions of black life under apartheid required.
Nat dealt with this mild disapproval with a lightness of spirit that was the most delightful feature of his personality – and of his writing. He was confident in his own beliefs and he knew exactly what he was doing. In his Rand Daily Mail columns his target audience was the paper’s predominantly white readership, even though its black readership was ballooning at the time under Laurence Gandar’s liberal editorship.
Nat the humanitarian believed emphatically that white South Africans, including the Afrikaners who had devised the apartheid ideology, were not inherently evil. They did not, as he wrote in one of his columns, “spend their time contemplating new and more effective ways of making scars on black skin.” No, he argued, the problem was that “most white South Africans have simply never opened their eyes to the reality of there being other humans besides the whites in this country”.
His mission, as he saw it, was to open those eyes. To that end his columns focused on his everyday experiences as a black person living under apartheid, his observations, his difficulties, the personalities of township characters and their lifestyles, his personal thoughts and ideas and how the whole asymmetric society looked from a black perspective.
We met in my office every Monday morning to chat about his ideas and agree on a subject he would write about for the following Saturday. He always had an abundance of ideas and these were stimulating sessions for both of us. The finished product was never a polemical tract. Nat achieved his objective with a deftly humorous touch, mocking rather than raging at the absurdities of apartheid and bringing his characters, from gangsters to angry intellectuals, to life as colourful human beings.
The impact on our white readers was striking. Nat’s column quickly acquired a devoted following, which found expression in the letters pages of the paper. I believe Nat’s real contribution to the eventual birth of the Rainbow Nation was in the many white eyes that he opened.
He was a talented and lovable soul. And effective. That is why I nominated him for the Nieman Fellowship, which I had myself experienced two years before. He was thrilled when he got it, appalled when he was denied a passport. He didn’t want to take that one-way ticket, but I persuaded him to do so.
The day before he was due to fly to the US he came to my home. “I can’t do this,” he said.
“You must Nat,” I urged. “You’ll never reach your full potential here, and these bastards can’t stay in power for ever. You’ll come back one day.”
l Sparks is a veteran journalist and political commentator.