{{The remains of renowned anti-apartheid journalist Nat Nakasa have been returned to South Africa from the US.}}
He was awarded a year’s fellowship to study journalism at Harvard University in 1964 and took his own life a year later in New York at the age of 28.
The apartheid government had refused to give him a passport so he had left on an exit permit, which meant he was unable to go home.
“Nat would be very happy,” his sister Gladys Maphumulo said.
Hero’s welcome
She attended the memorial service for Nakasa on Saturday in New York, a day after his remains were exhumed.
Nakasa started his career in Durban, and later moved to Johannesburg where he worked for Drum magazine and other publications.
The late Nadine Gordimer knew Nakasa during his time in Johannesburg, and said he was a good talker and through his columns revealed a “a highly personal kind” of journalism which showed the daily reality of apartheid “for one man living through it”.
His writing reflected the “gaiety of a serious man”, said the Nobel Prize-winning author, who died in July.
“The truth is that he was a new kind of man in South Africa,” she wrote in an essay published in a collection of her writing, Telling Times.
“He accepted without question and with easy dignity and natural pride his Africanness, and he took equally for granted that his identity as a man among men, a human among fellow humans, could not be legislated out of existence.”
wirestory
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