Birth place: Lusikisiki, Eastern Cape
Born: 12 May 1937
Died: 14 July 1965
“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.” – Nat Nakasa
Nat Nakasa was born to Joseph and his wife Alvina Nakasa and was the second of three children. He was forced to leave school without matriculating in 1954 because of poverty.
Nakasa moved to Durban and pursued a career as a reporter for Ilanga newspaper. Nakasa later moved to Johannesburg where he joined the popular Drum magazine in 1957.
Nakasa became the assistant editor of Drum and also wrote a column for the Rand Daily Mail. This newspaper was a white liberal publication and it was unusual for a black person to work there.
Joe Thloloe, a well known journalist and colleague of Nakasa’s, described Nakasa as a “smart dresser who would always be neat while we smelled of booze and were unwashed”.
Everyone who read his work was impressed by the way he criticised the apartheid system.
In 1964, Nakasa’s problems began when he was refused a passport by the South African government to go to America on a Niemen Fellowship to study at Harvard University.
Nakasa had to leave the country on an exit permit, which meant he would never be able to return home.
When the university programme ended, Nakasa went to New York and wrote articles for the New York Times. But his mind and soul was in Africa and he desperately wanted to come back to his beloved home.
When it became clear to him that this would forever be impossible, he committed suicide by jumping from a window of a high-rise building in New York on 14 July 1965.
Nat Nakasa’s body by was buried in New York. But in 2014, his remains were brought home and he was reburied in the Heroes Acre in Chesterville, KZN.
Nakasa’s collected writings have been published in a book, The world of Nat Nakasa.
