Nat Nakasa goes home

Usually, when you are summoned to a memorial service, the deceased’s memory and/or body is still warm, with mourners responding to the shock of a passing. In this case, the departed left us way back in l965, and we have come to church for a ceremony to send the departed from a celestial home to his real one.

I am sorry to report that I was the only Nieman Fellow present at the New York Memorial Service for what was called the ‘repatriation’ of the remains of South African writer Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa, Nieman Class of ‘64, better known to one and all as Nat, and praised still as one of his country’s most promising writers.

There was a Law Professor there, Harold MacDougall, whose former wife Gay became a leading South African solidarity activist and who first met Nat as a 19 year old undergraduate at Harvard. MacDougall was not his contemporary nor a journalist/colleague and yet filled the Nieman slot among the speakers. No one knew of my link, however tenuous.

Nat had schooled Harold on his culture by playing him the music of Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, according to his moving anecdotes about their conversations, born out of the friendship between one of only l9 black Harvard undergraduates at the time and the only black member of the Journalism fellowship.

Everyone spoke about Nakasa’s courage in leaving for America on a one-way exit permit that precluded his return. They talked of his incisive and often humorous writing about the sickness and cruelty of apartheid, and the despair that grew in the souls of many Africans about ever being able to dislodge that oppressive system.

He wrote at the time, ‘If I shall leave this country and decide not to come back, it will be because of a desire to avoid perishing in my own bitterness — a bitterness born of being reduced to a second-class citizen.’

A popular writer in South Africa, working for the Rand Daily Mail and Drum Magazine, he also had pieces in the New York Times and Esquire, to mention just two US media outlets that recognised his genius.

In the memorial bulletin at the church, we learned that he had also met Malcolm X, then on a mission to Africa in Tanzania, and would later be buried near him in the Ferncliff cemetery in Westchester.

His remains have now left but Malcolm remains.

The two men were very different. Malcolm was an inspirational and often flamboyant political leader; Nat was far quieter, humble, and was even called a liberal who avoided language that could be construed as hateful in any way.

A well-written recent New York Times profile by Daniel Massey described him then this way, ‘Mr. Nakasa was short and skinny, with a boyish, mischievous face. He never finished high school, but became a top writer for South Africa’s most popular black magazine, the first black editor of a South African literary journal and the first black columnist at a leading white newspaper. But the circumstances surrounding his death often overshadow his all-too-brief life. To understand how he wound up crashing to the pavement on the Upper West Side on the morning of July 14, 1965, is to grasp both the cruelty and the absurdity of apartheid.
‘Nat is a symbol of what it was like and what it should never, ever be like again,’ Joe Thloloe, a former colleague, said in a telephone interview.

Malcolm was killed by the bullets of assassins, members of the Muslim organisation he was leaving, with or without FBI help; Nakasa died officially by suicide, even though some members of his family believed he may have been pushed off the building he plunged from because his fellowship to Harvard was underwritten by a foundation with links to the CIA. It has been confirmed that he was on an FBI watch list.

There was no discussion of any of this speculation or suicide at the Church or even, sadly, of Nakasa’s writings, in any detail. He had all these years later become a symbol of something bigger—the pains and sacrifices of life in exile that drove many South Africans to drink and depression.

Massey noted, ‘One way Mr. Nakasa could cope with living under apartheid was to laugh about it, to see the dark humor in it. He mocked the system by flouting it’.
‘Nat engaged in a one-man defiance campaign,’ the South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile said in a telephone interview. ‘In spite of what the laws said, in spite of the terrorism of the police, the racism, the mechanisms of control they had in place, he was going to go ahead and live his life the way he wanted to.’ Or, as Mr. Nakasa himself wrote, ‘We believed that the best way to live with the colour bar in Johannesburg was to ignore it.’

As we in America seem consumed this summer with discussing suicide because of the tragic death of comedian Robin Williams, these issues are not spoken of quite as openly in South Africa.

An earlier profile in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian did however report, as the New York Times that profiled him did not:
‘Ndazana’s mother was mentally ill. Mental illness, my mother said, ran in the family. When they heard he had committed suicide they quite simply attributed it to the malady.’
Gladys Maphumulo, Nakasa’s surviving sister, does not believe that Nat died because he was mentally ill, but she does say that something was seriously wrong because Nat had sent them dollars before he had died. She says he wouldn’t possibly have done that if he was going to kill himself, though she does concede that there was a history of mental illness in the family. Their father, Chamberlain, had been institutionalised for 38 years. Their mother had died of a mental illness-related disease.
‘But the thing that killed Nat was his work,’ she said. ‘And we always felt, as a family, that that would be his undoing. But we are glad, however, that we will finally have a proper funeral when his body finally arrives here.’
His body is now on its way to South Africa after years of appeals from his family. The South African Department of Arts & Culture finally stepped in to pay for his last journey, as part of its work on preserving heritage.
The Minister of the Department, Nkosinathi Mthethwa, spoke movingly at the service at the Broadway Presbyterian Church across the street from Columbia University, and announced that the President of South Africa would pay tribute at the homecoming reburial for a writer who called himself a ‘citizen of nowhere’.
The event itself, like so many South African events, had a celebratory spirit about it, with feisty singing and some sermonising. Its message to Nat, and by extension, all who fought for freedom there: ‘Your legacy lives on.’ There was a feeling of what South Africans call ‘Ubuntu’, as if he was part of their extended family.
I thought to myself how great it would have been to meet him, as have many South African Niemans. I asked myself if our government would ever be generous enough to repatriate one of our own self-exiled African-American writers, like Richard Wright who is buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.
In the last two weeks, well before this ceremony, I rediscovered ‘Bring it on Home’, Sam Cooke’s classic song, covered by so many great soul artists, and have been humming and working out to it, not realising that this idea of home was also so universal or that I would soon connect with an unlikely connection.
It’s funny how governments exploit that desire, with the apartheid state creating so-called homelands to segregate blacks, and our own country establishing a Department of Homeland Security to equate the ‘war on terror’ with patriotism.
Still, as they say, home is where the heart is, for Nat and so many of us.
And yes, after all these years, Nat, you are still in our minds.

* News Dissector Danny Schechter, Nieman’77, blogs at Newsdissector.net and edits mediachannel.org.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Read another view of Nakasa here.

* THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR/S AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORIAL TEAM

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