Nat Nakasa’s bones matter to us too
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THIS week the broken bones of the esteemed exiled journalist Nat Nakasa were returned home. Nakasa’s solemn homecoming marks the beginning of an end to a sad chapter for his family. Closure.
For our oracle’s bones may untangle mysteries and clear dark spiritual paths. Can these bones solve the mystery of a young man’s fall from a high-rise building in New York? Did he jump or was he pushed?
Did depression or betrayal kill Nakasa? Did the CIA slay him? What really happened on that fateful July 14, 1965 night? Which gods or dogs are to blame?
Nakasa’s bones are dry and cold now. Yet they are special to a family that waited 49 years for their return home. Knowing that one’s own is dead is one thing, but knowing where his or her bones are laid to rest, is a completely different story.
May his soul finally rest in peace. Chesterville cemetery is a far cry from Ferncliff cemetery in upstate New York where his grave will be kept out of respect – a poignant symbol that Nakasa’s tragic end speaks to the tragedies of racist and unjust America and apartheid South Africa.
The bones matter too for our collective memory. We are still a fragile and young nation for whom the wounds of state-sponsored race oppression are fresh and frightening.
Even though we often choose to ignore or rubbish them, their gaping gaze is adamant. We are also a nation that for decades rendered its citizens stateless, simply because they dared speak truth to power held by a racist minority regime.
Born in 1937 in Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape, Nat Ndazana Nakasa grew up in Chesterville, attended a boarding school in Eshowe and started his journalism career at Ilanga newspaper.
An intrepid, charismatic and gifted journalist, he was the first black columnist to write for the Rand Daily Mail.
Nakasa belonged to a pantheon of pioneering black journalists of his time that included Arthur Maimane, Lewis Nkosi, Todd Matshikiza and Bloke Modisane.
They wrote for 1950s and early 1960s Drum and Golden City Post, and witnessed some major turning points in South Africa’s liberation struggle, such as the Rivonia Trial, Sharpeville and the banning of the ANC and the PAC.
Nakasa’s fingers had touched the glitter when he won the Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1964. Or so it seemed.
Lewis Nkosi, his childhood friend and fellow journalist, had already gone on the same prestigious scholarship in 1960.
Nakasa’s remains leave behind a boiling and bloodstained America. The same America in which he had sought refuge, only to be shocked to death by the ugly mess of ’60s American racism.
He had (naively) hoped his talents in the free world would earn him endless opportunities but never discovered the stone under which his fortunes and freedom lay.
On August 9, an 18-year-old black youth, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a white police officer in a St Louis suburb in the state of Missouri. The violence now gripping the land of the free is in the main a result of a private autopsy that revealed that the unarmed black youth had been shot six times, twice in the head.
The sordid drama of racially bigoted murders is part of America’s slave trade and its haunting historical hang-ups.
Lynching mobs may be no more, yet more so-called crafty avenues still rear their ugly heads for the slaughter of black men to continue.
Brown’s senseless murder evokes James Baldwin’s 1964 play, Blues for Mister Charlie, a work dedicated to the memory of Emmett Till, a Mississippi black youth murdered by a bunch of racists in 1955.
The land of the free continues to murder its own at the crossroads of progress and the old chauvinism that afflicts our times across seas and continents.
While Nat Nakasa’s remains get buried at home, racism, colonialism and apartheid still stare at the human race with eyes of fire.
Racial oppression and its obligatory violence will for a long time be part of the ugly broad narrative that binds the US and South Africa, a shared and shameful heritage.
Naked racism may be rare nowadays. No wonder even hardened racists appear as men and women of reason and moral virtue.
Some self-appointed guardians at times behave as if they hold sinister wishes of criminalising the liberation struggle and its unfinished mission. Yesterday’s slayers bay for the liberator’s blood as if craving to see their heads as trophies to bolster their wanton hunting safaris.
Apartheid stripped Nat Nakasa of his citizenship. His death and that of Michael Brown, Emmett Till, Ahmed Timol and Phila Ndwandwe, among others, must never be in vain.
These souls command us to heighten our thunderous rage against racism and all prejudice still afflicting humanity. Justice is their haunting cry.
Sandile Ngidi is a Joburg-based journalist.