A Native of Nowhere: The Life of Nat Nakasa 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. Born
Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa on May 12, 1937 like 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. Attempts to bring Nakasa’s body home
bore no fruit, and he was buried at the Ferncliff cemetery in
upstate New York. A headstone placed by the Nieman Foundation 30
years later simply reads: Nathaniel Nakasa May 12 1937 - July 14
1965. Journalist, Nieman Fellow, South African. 1038 (the tombstone
number). Many await the repatriation of Nat Nakasa’s body to South
African.
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