The World Of Nat Nakasa
Edited by Essop Patel
Picador Africa R89
Nat Nakasa remains a shining star in the constellation that was black journalism of the 1950s.
Like most of the great writers of that time, he cut his teeth on Drum, but reached out across the racial divides when he was hired to write a column from a black African perspective for the Rand Daily Mail's predominantly white readership.
Nakasa flitted effortlessly across the colour bar to the chagrin of the more militant black writers of the time, eventually founding and editing The Classic, a literary magazine, supported by intellectuals of all hues, most notably Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.
He won a coveted Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard University, but the apartheid government would not grant him a passport, condemning him to exile if he took up the year-long study.
Less than a year later he was dead, having thrown himself from a seventh story flat in New York after remarking: I can't laugh anymore and when I can't laugh, I can't write.
His death conflicted his peers. Many prominent black writers abhorred Nakasa's friendships with the white liberal intelligentsia. His unwillingness to see colour, to live in the townships or to adopt the mannerisms and radical militancy against apartheid, some saw as a sell-out.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu though remembers Nakasa as the original South African rainbow man, when the rainbow was forbidden. Indeed, one of Nakasa's best known pieces, It's difficult to decide my identity, where he wrote: My people are South Africans. Mine is the history of the Great Trek, Gandhi's passive resistance in Johannesburg, the wars of Cetshwayo (sic) - all these are South African things, they are part of me, is believed to have formed the basis of Thabo Mbeki's much lauded and admired I am an African speech.
This is the third edition of The World Of Nat Nakasa edited by Essop Patel, today a High Court judge.
This edition contains all of Nakasa's best known work, especially his much quoted final column for the Rand Daily Mail, A Native of Nowhere. The book succeeds on a number of fronts: as a vital collection of Nakasa's journalism, which is simultaneously witty and bittersweet, as well as an incredibly valuable insight into the tumultuous world of South Africa, and especially Johannesburg in the late '50s and early '60s through his piercing eye and engaging prose.
Nakasa remains an enduring apartheid tragedy. He neither died in detention, nor was he shot in a protest, but his lifelong belief in the goodness of humanity was irreparably eroded and finally extinguished, paradoxically in the world's supposedly greatest democracy.
He was forced to take his own life rather than face the prospect of a barren exile in a place that he discovered was as racist, as cruel as the one he had been forced out of his homeland by.
Half of all the proceeds of the sale of this book will go towards funding the exhumation of his remains in New York and their re-interment in South Africa.
If for no other reason, South Africans should go out and buy several copies, for the candle that is Nat Nakasa's legacy should never be allowed to be doused. That would be the grossest tragedy.