Remembering the late Nakasa Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa was born - TopicsExpress



          

Remembering the late Nakasa Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa was born on May 12, 1937, the second of five children of Alvina, a teacher, and Chamberlain, a typesetter and a freelance writer. His parents, educated at mission schools, were relatively well off for black South Africans, but Alvina fell into a deep depression after the birth of their last child and had to be institutionalized. With his family squeezed financially, Mr. Nakasa never finished high school. After completing the 10th grade, he began to search for work. His career started at Durban’s Zulu-language newspaper, The Natal Sun, where he worked as a tea boy and then as a reporter. He parlayed that into a job at Drum, a magazine that covered urban black life, and moved to Johannesburg. “He came, I remember, in the morning with a suitcase and a tennis racket — ye gods, a tennis racket!” his colleague Can Themba wrote in a tribute to Mr. Nakasa published after his death. Mr. Nakasa didn’t exactly fit in with his hard-charging co-workers, who liked their drinks neat and moved about the townships freely. He preferred his brandy with Coke, and favored the leafy white suburbs over the dusty black townships. One way Mr. Nakasa could cope with living under apartheid was to laugh about it, to see the dark humor in it. He mocked the system by flouting it. “Nat engaged in a one-man defiance campaign,” the South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile said in a telephone interview. “In spite of what the laws said, in spite of the terrorism of the police, the racism, the mechanisms of control they had in place, he was going to go ahead and live his life the way he wanted to.” Or, as Mr. Nakasa wrote, “We believed that the best way to live with the colour bar in Johannesburg was to ignore it.” He dated white women, went to mixed-race parties, and even put an ad in the paper seeking a white maid.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 11:43:41 +0000

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