A life cut short by exile and despair

Looking back on the life of writer Nat Nakasa, who is to be reburied in Durban on Saturday next week

It was at the end of 1957 and we were having our monthly editorial meeting at the Drum office, chaired by the editor, Sylvester Steyn. Those present were the owner, Jim Bailey, chief subeditor Joe Blumberg, photographer Peter Magubane, Henry Nxumalo and some of the subeditors and circulation and advertising staff. Alcohol abuse by some Drum staff was discussed along with the need for fresh blood and new ideas.

Steyn mentioned that he had been closely monitoring two promising young journalists on the popular Zulu language weekly Ilanga Lase Natal, and he would like to bring them to Johannesburg to join Drum ... these were two friends, Lewis Nkosi, 21, and Nat Nakasa, 20.

Nkosi and Nakasa agreed enthusiastically to join the Drum team in Johannesburg - Nkosi arrived on the next train and Nakasa about a month later. Can Themba agreed to put Nakasa up and went to Johannesburg station to collect him.

Themba said Nakasa arrived with a suitcase and a tennis racquet - an unlikely image for a tough and gritty Drum journalist. Nakasa stayed with Themba at his "House of Truth" in Sophiatown, where the busy social scene was peppered with alcohol and girls.

Later Nakasa moved to live with friends in a flat in white Hillbrow, or sometimes a house in Parktown, but occasionally he ended up sleeping on the floor of the Drum office.

Nakasa had a young, friendly face full of smiles and laughter. He was short and slim, usually smartly and sportily dressed, often wearing a tie, and gave the impression of a confident young man-about-town. I never heard him speak Zulu; he spoke only English.

For the first year Nakasa and Nkosi worked almost exclusively for the Golden City Post where Cecil Eprile was editor, but they often joined us at our monthly Drum conference and offered story ideas. One day Nakasa talked to me about Nadine Gordimer, whose work he admired. She also admired his writing, and Drum, and had invited him to a dinner party.

A week later we went to her house in Parktown. Gordimer welcomed us and we were seated at a long and elaborately laid dinner table where all the guests were already seated. Nakasa was the only black person there. Gordimer introduced him as a promising young African writer.

I felt rather uneasy and out of place because the evening was very formal, with dinner served by waiters in white gloves. Themba would have described the guests as "typical white liberals", but Nakasa felt relaxed and was very entertaining, talking happily about his adventures as a black man living in a white world.

One story he told was that when he talked to officials on the phone they thought he was white, treated him with respect and were helpful. When he gave his surname, they thought they had misheard it and presumed it must be something British like McKenzie. After he spelt out his surname the officials asked his nationality, then their tone changed and they became angry and insulting.

Some of the dinner guests reacted with embarrassed laughter on hearing these stories.

I left Drum in 1959 and started working for the Sunday Times as chief photographer.

Allister Sparks, the then editor of the Rand Daily Mail, offered Nakasa a job as a regular column writer in late 1963. Since he and I worked in the same building, the South African Associated Newspapers building at 176 Main Street, we often met in the canteen.

He had become very depressed by the increasingly rigid apartheid laws, which were severely limiting his life and his writing. He also began to feel uneasy because he was being watched by the security police, who had made inquiries about him after spotting him at various ANC meetings.

Nakasa mentioned that Nkosi had gone to the US after being offered a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. He left with an exit visa, which meant that he forfeited his South African citizenship.

Nakasa was upset that many other friends and colleagues had also left South Africa, such as Todd Matshikiza, Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane and Steyn. Themba had gone to Swaziland to teach. Nakasa was now thinking seriously of applying to universities in the US and leaving the country.

A few months later I met him again. I had read some outstanding columns he had written for the Rand Daily Mail and congratulated him on his writing. He was more enthusiastic than the previous time we had met, and was planning to start a new literary magazine called The Classic with the help of Gordimer. It would feature stories and poems by African writers. He was confident about raising funds from a US sponsor, John Thomson, through the Farfield Foundation.

Nakasa was not aware that this foundation was a front for the CIA, which had financed many cultural and intellectual projects. This was exposed some years later by the London Observer. Nakasa was also unaware that a member of the Drum editorial team was on the CIA payroll.

The last time I met Nakasa was in 1964, the year I left South Africa. The security police were hounding me and stringent new censorship laws were being introduced that suppressed any newspaper or magazine they deemed harmful to public morals. Essentially, all free speech was blocked.

Nakasa left South Africa on a Nieman Fellowship of his own a few months after I did.

I was shocked and saddened when I heard about his suicide in New York. It was difficult to comprehend because Nakasa did not seem the depressed type who would go to such extremes of despair.

When I went to New York in 1968 and 1979, and also while in London in the early '80s, I met up with another young and talented exile, the photographer Ernest Cole. He had been my assistant on Drum in 1958 and left South Africa in 1966, taking with him a large collection of his photographs that showed the realities of life under apartheid.

Magnum Photos took care of him and published his landmark book, The House of Bondage, which became an international hit. The former editor of the New York Times, Joe Lelyveld, took him under his wing. I found that Cole had become very depressed and had almost given up on his life and work, despite his success. He had lost interest in the world around him.

It seemed to me that many exiled South Africans, especially those in the US, had unrealistically high expectations of a better life outside South Africa. Having seen the success of people like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte and Nat King Cole, whose work they admired, they presumed that life was free and equal in the US.

However, the reality was that they were homesick, they could not return to their own country, and they experienced racism from both black and white Americans.

One of the tragedies of apartheid was that many of South Africa's brightest and best chose a life of exile rather than suffer the indignities and hardships at home. When Nat Nakasa's life was prematurely cut short in New York in 1965, South Africa lost one of its most promising literary talents - a rising star with a bright future, a man whose life should have been filled with hope and optimism rather than depression and despair.