Even in death there is no peace for Nat Nakasa

In his article “In life and death Nakasa a grave indictment of how SA treats its heroes” (February 6), Barney Mthombothi brought to our attention the sacrilegious act of the vandalisation of Nat Nakasa’s tombstone. I am equally peeved as I believe no good reason can be proffered to justify such a heinous deed.

Mthombothi rightly states that “Nakasa occupies a special place in the pantheon of South African journalism”. It is not surprising that the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) named its top award after him. The hallmark of Nakasa’s contribution is probably his resolve to create a society in which all races lived together in harmony. As the first black columnist of the white-dominated Rand Daily Mail, Nakasa brought South Africans of all walks of life together.

He died in 1965 after falling from the seventh floor of a building near Central Park in New York. His remains were repatriated and reburied at Heroes Acre in his hometown of Chesterville in 2014.

This is the legacy Mthombothi invokes, but what undermines his piece is the understated role of the government in the return of Nakasa’s remains as well as factual inaccuracies surrounding the moment of his death. Nakasa had left SA on an exit permit, and even in death the apartheid government did not allow his body back home.

The Nakasa family had been calling for the return of Nakasa’s remains since his passing to no avail. Following the discovery of  his unmarked grave at Ferncliff Cemetery in New York by journalist Dana Snyman, the media fraternity intensified the campaign for the repatriation of Nakasa’s remains.

Commenting on this, Mthombothi writes: “That culminated in arts & culture minister Nathi Mthethwa accompanying the family to New York to repatriate his remains.” The visit to the US in August 2014 was indeed the culmination of efforts by different stakeholders over a number of years, but the government did more than just accompany the family, like kids walking to a corner shop to buy sweets. 

In April 2012 the late professor Keorapetse Kgositsile and I were sent by the arts & culture department to the US on official business, which included a fact-finding mission for the reburial of Nakasa.

We met a number of activists and academics who were involved in the efforts to repatriate Nakasa’s remains.  Upon our return, the legal processes began  and a committee comprising  representatives from the national government, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government and Sanef was formed.

On June 20 2014, Mthethwa broke the news at the Nat Nakasa Awards dinner at the Taj Hotel in Cape Town: “We have now obtained permission to exhume and repatriate Nat Nakasa’s mortal remains back to home soil… While it is the state that finally made this major breakthrough, we are conscious of the fact that it would not have been possible without the collective efforts of various stakeholders, especially the media.”

In August, Mthethwa led a delegation to New York, comprised of officials from the three tiers of government and the Nakasa family. It was the first time that the family, led by Nakasa’s sister and only remaining sibling, Gladys Maphumulo, visited the gravesite.

As she gazed at the freshly disinterred bones of her brother, whom she had last seen 50 years earlier, waving a white handkerchief as the plane was about to take off, Maphumulo’s knees gave in. It was a very emotional moment, one that filled a void. 

Arriving back in SA with Nakasa’s remains was a moment of victory. Hundreds of people had gathered at the King Shaka airport to witness the end of Nakasa’s exile

Arriving back in SA with Nakasa’s remains was a moment of victory. Hundreds of people had gathered at King Shaka airport to witness the end of Nakasa’s exile. “This will hopefully bring closure to a horrific chapter that has remained a blight in our history for almost 50 years. His homecoming is the restoration of his citizenship and dignity as a human being,” said Mthethwa.  It was a moment of jubilation, a success story of our democratic dispensation, and of course, politicians milked it for dear life, as did the media.

Writing about Nakasa’s death, Mthombothi says: “After his fellowship at Harvard, the prospect of not coming back home must have haunted him. Visiting South African friends in New York in July 1965, he plunged to his death from the seventh floor of an apartment building.”

In fact, Nakasa was visiting his US friend and benefactor, Jack Thompson, executive director of the Farfield Foundation, whom he met through Lewis Nkosi and who organised financial assistance for both of them to go to Harvard on Niemann Fellowships,  and who provided Nakasa with money to establish his literary magazine, The Classic, in 1963. 

Nakasa’s biographer, Ryan Brown, makes a startling revelation in A Native of Nowhere (2014) that the Farfield Foundation had links with the CIA. Nakasa was oblivious to the Farfield Foundation’s connections with the CIA, yet he and Nkosi had been bankrolled by the agency since 1961. This is further confirmed in a recent book, White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa by Susan Williams, in which she writes: “Soon after his arrival in the US, he became a subject of surveillance by South African intelligence and the FBI.”

On June 14 1965, Nakasa’s body was found on the sidewalk. He had plunged from Thompson’s apartment. In a documentary entitled Nat Nakasa: A Native of Nowhere, directed by Lauren Groenewald and first broadcast in 1999, Thompson asserts that Nakasa had said something about killing himself. Nakasa’s brothers, Joseph and Kenneth Nakasa, featured in the same documentary, are adamant that their brother did not commit suicide.

It is quite peculiar that Thompson, a covert CIA agent, was the last person to see Nakasa alive and that Nakasa’s file remained classified for several decades. These factors lead Williams to conclude: “One can speculate that Nakasa had discovered the source of his financial support and was planning to expose it.” The combination of depression and suicide is often the easy way out in cases of mysterious deaths.

At the time of his death, Nakasa was working on a biography of Miriam Makeba and cherished many other great ambitions. When he plunged from Thompson’s apartment, the dreams of a young South African were shattered. His reburial on home soil was thought to be closure for all those who cared about him; it is unfortunate that even after his remains have been brought home, Nakasa cannot seem to rest in peace.

• Mahala is an author and literary historian. His play, 'Bloke & His American Bantu', opens at the University of Johannesburg on February 16. His biography of Can Themba will be published in March.