“This is Simply a Personal Statement from Me to You”

On August 18th I attended the memorial service for Nat Nakasa at the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Harlem.  What began as a somber event quickly turned joyous as we celebrated the South African writer and editor’s long overdue trip home. With isiZulu songs echoing off the church walls, it was truly a moving experience.  The only trouble was, had it not been for the life-sized photographs of Nakasa flanking the altar, I might not have recognized who we were there celebrating.  Words like “stalwart” were used to recall South Africa’s long struggle against white supremacy and Nakasa was described as ‘the voice’ of his long suffering community. The keynote address by Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa related him to Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the ANC founding father who had attended nearby Columbia University at the turn of the 20th century.

I am a historian, who researches and writes on South African literary history.  I first came to know Nakasa through his literary journal, The Classic.  I was writing a MA thesis about four South African journals/magazines; Drum, The Classic, New Classic, and Staffrider. I was introduced to Nakasa in a thoroughly historicized fashion.  Which is to say: I came to know him as the product of his social context, a writer embedded in a set of institutions and personal relationships that conditioned his voice.  I completed my MA thesis in 2010 and turned my attention to other aspects of South African writing and reading (you can read it here).  Over the past few years, I have read with fascination as biographers, journalists, and politicians reanimated the writer I had met in the archive.  In the last few months, however, the Nakasa I knew has become almost unrecognizable.  My growing sense of unease reached a crescendo in Harlem, for to memorialize or commemorate a person generally means ripping them from their historical context and cramming them into whatever present space is vacant and useful.  This is what it means to do violence to memory, forgetting the past while forcing it to do work.

“What happens to the writings of a man when he is dead and gone?” Nakasa once asked Essop Patel, who later published a collection of Nakasa’s work.  This poignant depiction of a young man grasping for validation of his time on Earth was recalled at the memorial service as a way to remind us all that Nakasa lives on in his written legacy.  Yet if one were to peruse the numerous articles written since MinisterMthethwa’s announcement that Nakasa was coming home (and often enough before that too) it would be difficult to make the claim that this legacy has been honored.

Nakasa was a writer, and his writing offers us the best historical evidence available.  Nakasa’s archive primarily consists of his published writings, various collections of correspondence (mostly at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, a bit in Austin, TX, USA), official documents (U.S.A. and R.S.A government files), and personal anecdotes and recollections.  All of this material has been available to be considered by anyone interested, yet for decades Nakasa’s legacy remained largely a matter of academic interest, if that.  That began to change in the late 1990s, however, when a prestigious South African journalism award was named after him.  By the time I was researching my thesis in 2008 – 2009, his was a bigger name, due in no small part to the Office of the President awarding him the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver in the late 2000s. In the wake of this celebrity revival, people began to take a greater interest in Nakasa. Ryan Brown, an American freelance journalist won a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011 to research his life (she wrote about her project on AIAC in 2012).Interest in Nakasa has since abounded – resulting in, among other coverage, the American journalist Danny Massey’s expansive New York Times piece on Nakasa’s American exile, which drew liberally from published and unpublished academic research.

One thing all of these accounts share is a general feeling of unease with the ambiguity that Nakasa proposes as subject. His was not a life that fit many of the preconceived narratives through which we grasp black South African existence. I and other students of Nakasa acknowledge the liminal nature of his experiences through well-worn references to “fringe country” or the space between two worlds, but too many of us inevitably gravitate toward rigid categorical evaluations of who he was, what he did, and why it mattered. The temptation to make him ‘count’ in the way that South Africans are supposed to ‘count’ is too great. We want him to be a hero in the most recognizable sense of the word.

Why else would it be suggested at this man’s memorial service that he was a people’s champion of the struggle?  A cursory review of his portfolio should make it abundantly clear how inappropriate this is.  In the first issue of The Classic, his own magazine, he chose to reprint one of his speeches in which he opened with a disclaimer rejecting the responsibility to represent Africans or “anybody at all” (The Classic 1, no. 1 (1963): 56). “This is simply a personal statement from me to you,” he explained.  Obviously this has been a difficult concept to take seriously.

Conflicts over representation are nothing new when it comes to Nakasa though.  It is quite clear from his published works that he was having a difficult time figuring himself out and finding his place in the world.  Those who followed him have an an equally difficult time fixing a definition on this writer.  In her 2008 thesis, Heather Margaret Acott provides perhaps the best accounting of how Nakasa’s fortune rose and fell in the press during the 1990s according to the need for “’rainbow nation’ icons.”

I would suggest, however, that what has been happening in the press recently reflects something slightly different.  In the early 2000s, South African art and culture critic, Sandile Memela wrote two articles castigating the liberal white media establishment and Nakasa as their “darling” (see “The Man who was at Odds with his Identity” City Press, 9 September 2001). “Because he was a major hit in white liberal circles,” Memela explained, “he has been exhumed from the grave and made an icon of black journalism.” Memela has surely revised his opinion because he made the trip to New York to act as host of the memorial service for Nakasa’s actual exhumation.

Let me be clear: the problem is not that Memela changed his mind. There is nothing pernicious about people’s interpretation of evidence changing with time.  What troubles me is that Memela’s change of heart illustrates the fickle ways in which he and others continue to police the past, to pick and choose what lives and perspectives are worthy of remembrance and celebration. At one time Nakasa was out of bounds because he had the temerity to write to white audiences, which disqualified him from serious consideration as a representative of the people. Now, before my eyes, he was and is repositioned, first as a misunderstood prophet of the ‘rainbow nation,’ and now as the anti-apartheid voice of black communities.

It is astonishing to watch Nakasa himself being shaped to fit today’s needs.  He is being unmoored from his own life, the issues that concerned him, the evidence that is his writing, and the context that motivated that work.

Why was Nakasa’s body met at King Shaka by an MK honor guard?  I understand the need for spectacle and ceremony, but neither MK – nor, to be clear, the broad-based struggle against apartheid – was his life.  Are the trappings of the struggle the best way to remember this writer –  or are they simply the only way?  Howard University Law Professor Harold McDougall, who knew Nakasa at Harvard, spoke at the ceremony in New York; he described a mentoring program he had developed and urged South African officials to consider establishing such a program for young journalists in Nakasa’s memory. At Wits you can read a letter Nakasa wrote to Lewis Nkosi expressing his hope that The Classic might inspire four new township writers per year. This is how we should celebrate Nakasa.This fits.

In the discipline of history, as well as contemporary politics, the struggle has exerted an enormous gravitational pull for years.  Rightly so: the dismantling of apartheid was an incredible victory worthy of study and celebration.  The greatness of this victory is matched only by the terribleness of the system; indeed, it is theawfulness that makes the victory great.  Yet what Nakasa’s recent treatment reveals is that the awfulness and greatness have become disconnected somehow.  This week’s celebration demands that Nakasa fit into an easily recognizable role in that victory; writing through that awfulness is no longer enough.

The Johannesburg journalist Neo Maditla recently wrote that Nakasa was “unremarkable.” Nakasa was not unlike most South Africans who survived apartheid oppression just “trying to make it to the next day.”  This feat (occasionally known as life) only appears unremarkable within the framework of an oppression-resistance binary, which has the effect of flattening the amazing texture of so many lives, including Nakasa’s.  The insistence that only struggle lives are worth remembering and celebrating is the policing of the past.  It leaves the vast majority of South Africans, those who did their best to get by and to leave something behind for future generations, on the outside looking in, marginalized for their failure adequately to ‘struggle.’  In 1986, South African writer Njabulo Ndebele cautioned South Africa’s writers against allowing spectacle to dominate their collective literary imagination and extolled attention to the mundane, the ordinary.  Perhaps Nakasa should inspire us to rediscover the unremarkable?  For if the struggle against white supremacy is the only story worth acknowledging, than that oppressive system has truly retained its grip on authority in mockery of all that was sacrificed in the name of the future.

While Nakasa was quite remarkable in a number of ways, to enumerate these would take us down another path over which his failure to ‘struggle’ would loom.  So I conclude with this notion that he was unremarkable.  On Saturday President Zuma will preside over Nakasa’s reburial.  Will he allow Nat to speak through his own words?  Who will be returning to Chesterville, a prodigal son or a triumphant hero?  Is it even possible to celebrate a black South African who lived in the second half of the twentieth-century without making reference to the struggle?  Do we have the vocabulary for such a celebration?

After the memorial service I briefly spoke with a South African reporter for her radio program.  She asked how I, as someone who has done some scholarly work on the subject, think about and remember Nakasa?  I replied that as I’ve lived with Nakasa my thoughts on him have changed, running the gamut from struggle writer to CIA stooge, but recently I’ve decided that I like thinking of him best as a young man just trying to find his way in the world by writing.  She was not impressed and quickly went off, presumably to find someone willing to say something about fringe life or rainbows.

I like my image of Nakasa as a young man writing and living. I think we’re just out of practice understanding that as something worth celebrating.