THE DISTANT DRUMMER
Nat Nakasa’s tragic exile in New York will be dramatised this year at Carnegie Hall, in a new play by Christopher Hope, writes Michele Magwood
IN photographs now he seems impossibly young. Impish, sharply dressed, a gamine angle to the hand holding a cigarette. A writer manqué, in a way, a slyly ironic understudy to the jocose, roistering journos Can Themba and Bloke Modisane.
Nat Nakasa was just 28 when he threw himself from a seventh-floor window overlooking Central Park in New York. Depressed, lonely and sick with longing for his homeland, he was disillusioned with the America he had once revered but he was banned from returning to South Africa.
His study visa had run out and wouldn’t be renewed. The FBI was taking an interest in him. He was trapped. He was, in his immortal words, “a native of nowhere”.
Now his story is being brought to the stage in that city, told by one of South Africa’s most acclaimed writers and his son, a world-renowned musician. And not just any stage — the illustrious Carnegie Hall.
In October, Manhattan will thrum to an Mzansi beat as the Carnegie hosts a citywide three-week festival titled UBUNTU — Music and Arts of South Africa. Dedicated to Mandela’s legacy and marking 20 years of democracy, it was inspired, the organisers say, by “the cultural life of this incredibly diverse country. It has a cultural life like none other.”
Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Angelique Kidjo, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, David Kramer, William Kentridge and Dizu Plaatjies are all on the festival bill.
One of the highlights will be A Distant Drum — commissioned especially by Carnegie Hall. “The organisers approached me to create something extraordinary,” says Daniel Hope, “and the first thing I did was call my father.” Daniel is a world-renowned classical violinist; his father is the distinguished novelist Christopher Hope.
Daniel was born in Durban and when he was six months old Christopher, a fierce opponent of apartheid, took his family and left the country. His satirical novel A Separate Developmentwas promptly banned.
“I’d wanted to write about Nat Nakasa for a long time,” says Christopher. “I knew his old friend Lewis Nkosi well, and when Lewis and I, long-standing expatriates that we were, bumped into each other in London or Warsaw or Paris, we talked, as all wandering South Africans did, about the country and its writers and its strange mixtures of tragedy and comedy.
“That led to Nakasa, who, like Herman Charles Bosman, saw both tragedy and comedy and had trouble telling the difference. A most South African dilemma. It comes across in everything he wrote.”
Daniel had in mind Igor Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, a theatrical work “to be read, played, and danced” with a small cast of actors. “It’s about the devil and temptation, about despair and love, and I’ve always wanted to create a modern-day version of it. We used it as a loose model for A Distant Drum.”
Nakasa was just hitting his stride as a writer when he won a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard in 1964. He was a senior journalist on Drum magazine, the first black columnist on the Rand Daily Mail, and had launched a literary magazine The Classic, named after a shebeen in Sophiatown.
He was refused a passport and chose, fatally, to leave on an exit permit which meant he could never come home.
In one of the great ironies of the story, The Classic was funded by a nebulous American philanthropic organisation called the Fairfield
The FBI was taking interest in him. He was trapped, ‘a native of nowhere’
Foundation.
It supported artistic and cultural projects around the world and its chairman, Jack Thompson, arranged for Nakasa to apply for the Nieman and looked after him in New York.
What Nakasa could not have known was that the Fairfield Foundation was bankrolled by the CIA, one of several organisations set up to dispense largesse across the cultural elites of the capitalist world, to encourage a pro-American, specifically anti-Communist world view.
It was from Thompson’s window that Nakasa jumped that night. “To play the piece in New York is also very appropriate because it was New York that Nakasa adored from afar, only to find when he got there, he preferred Sophiatown,” says Christopher.
“He was never depressed in South Africa. He may have been sad and angry, but he was defiantly witty, he had an unputdownable sense of self. He was wounded into laughter.”
But his months at Harvard leached the life from him. He despised its conservatism and the entrenched racism of the US, feeling, when asked to address yet another audience about “the South African situation”, that he was “a puppet dangling from a string”, a sop to white liberals to assuage their guilt.
He told Thompson he couldn’t laugh anymore, “and if I can’t laugh I can’t write”.
A Distant Drum captures a lot of his humour. “It’s a sort of defiant comedy,” says Christopher. “I rather hope it would have made him smile.”
Daniel is now curating music for the production, under the expert eye — or ear — of Andrew Tracey. He’s melding Kofifi rhythm with Harlem jazz and with something more elusive. “I have all the colours, like the pennywhistle and the accordion to hark back to the shebeens, plus the New York jazz that was exploding at the time. But I need to introduce something else, perhaps electronic, to reflect his growing disillusionment, his sense of displacement.”
They’re especially pleased to have signed up Atandwa Kani, John Kani’s son, to play Nakasa, and Christiaan Schoombie will play both a security policeman and Jack Thompson. The production will be directed by Jerry Mofokeng, the new artistic director of the Performing Arts Centre of the Free State. The show will be staged in Bloemfontein at the Andre Huguenot Theatre on October 13 and 14 before heading for Manhattan.
Nakasa lies buried in upstate New York, a few graves down from Malcolm X. Miriam Makeba, herself in exile, sang a Zulu lament at his funeral. Hugh Masekela was there, too. Nothing has ever come of plans to bring his remains home.
His name lives on in the annual Nat Nakasa journalism award, which recognises courage, integrity and fearless reporting. Past winners have included Max du Preez, Mzilikazi wa Afrika and Jessica Bezuidenhout.
It’s a pity that more South Africans won’t see A Distant Drum.
“I hope it lives on in repertory,” says Daniel. “I’d like to see it regularly run in South Africa.”
At home, he was defiantly witty — wounded into laughter