Nat Nakasa can rest at last

The "Native of Nowhere" is home.

"Today marks the culmination of a journey that began 50 years ago when Nat Nakasa left his motherland on an exit permit, leaving him a stateless person," said Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa yesterday.

"He later described himself as 'a Native of Nowhere'," said Mthethwa during a ceremony at Durban's King Shaka International Airport.

"We are proud to have restored his dignity and given him back his citizenship."

Mthethwa led a delegation to New York to bring back the anti-apartheid journalist's remains for reburial in South Africa. They were exhumed on Friday.

Nakasa worked for the Golden City Post, the Rand Daily Mail and Drum magazine.

He was forced to leave South Africa on an exit visa when the apartheid government refused him a passport to travel to the US to take up a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.

The 28-year-old died after falling from a building in New York in 1965. It is believed that he committed suicide.

He was buried in New York's Ferncliff Cemetery.

The executive director of the SA National Editors' Forum, Mathatha Tsedu, also a Nieman fellow, said he could only imagine the emotions experienced by Nakasa's only surviving sibling, Gladys Maphumulo, when she visited his grave at Ferncliff last week.

Nakasa's former colleague, Joe Thloloe, said Nakasa's grave in Heroes' Acre, in Chesterville, west of Durban, would be a symbol of what should never happen again.

Nakasa's nephew, Sipho Masondo, said many wounds were healed when the family visited a cemetery in Harlem that Nakasa frequented.

The family also visited Harvard University and the building from which Nakasa plunged to his death.

"Durban knows Nat and the soil of Chesterville knows Nat Nakasa," Masondo said.

Nakasa's remains will be reburied on September 13.