Tactics of the Habitat: the Elusive Identity of Nat Nakasa by Heather Margaret Acott Dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at the University of South Africa Supervisor: Professor Ivan Rabinowitz October 2008 DECLARATION I, Heather Margaret Acott, declare that this is my own unaided work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. October 2008 ii CONTENTS Declaration ii Contents iii Acknowledgements iv Summary v Illustration: ‘Jo’burg man’ vi Introduction 1 Chapter one: An African flaneur 7 Chapter two: Media icon 44 Chapter three: Auto/biographer 78 Chapter four: An elusive identity 104 Select bibliography 121 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks to all those who shared their memories of Nat Nakasa with me: To Nadine Gordimer and Allister Sparks, Joe Thloloe and Raymond Louw, David Hazelhurst, Sylvester Stein and Pippa Stein. Thanks to e-tv for providing me with a copy of the video Native of Nowhere, and to Carol Archibald for help in finding the Classic files in the Historical and Literary Papers, University of the Witwatersrand. Thanks particularly to artist Arlene Amaler-Raviv and photographer Dave Yudelman for permission to use their photomontage, ‘Jo’burg Man’. iv SUMMARY In this dissertation on Nat Nakasa I argue, in Chapter 1, that he is one of South Africa’s first literary flaneurs. Walking the city as an urban spectator, part journalist, part sociologist, his modernist writings of the metropolis celebrate Johannesburg and also place him in a broad international context. His ‘tactics of the habitat’, in Foucault’s phrase, become subversive ruses, a navigation through the cultural seam of South Africa in the 1960s, and this approach offers an alternative to a reductionist anti-apartheid critique. Chapter 2 analyses the excavation of his memory and subsequent elevation to media icon, with the naming of the SANEF Award for Media Integrity after him. Chapter 3 discusses how his auto/biographical writings and representation of self and other contribute to ‘making history’s silences speak’. Finally in chapter 4, I discuss his elusive identity as part of the Drum generation, an insider/outsider, and his exile and suicide in America. KEYWORDS Nat Nakasa; flaneur; media icon; Michel de Certeau; auto/biographer; Drum writers; exile; tyranny of place. v Jo’burg Man, by Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelman vi INTRODUCTION Nat Nakasa is one of the legendary journalists who worked on Drum magazine in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was appointed as the first black columnist on the Rand Daily Mail, and moved on to become the founding editor of The Classic, a non- political literary journal in which he undertook ‘to seek African writing of merit’, regardless of the race of the contributor. In 1964 he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard University, but had to leave South Africa on a one- way exit permit for the United States as the government of the day refused him a passport. After a year in America, he committed suicide, possibly because of his exiled condition. His non-racial stance, and refusal to accept the racial and spatial boundaries of that time have earned him an iconic status, with a major journalism award being named after him – the Nat Nakasa Award for Media Integrity; he has also received the State President’s Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for excellent achievement ‘in the field of arts, culture, literature, music, journalism or sport’. Yet despite these awards, his work suffers from a benign neglect, with low sales of his collected work, The World of Nat Nakasa, and little academic interest in his writing. He remains an insider/outsider in South African literature, a ‘Native of Nowhere’ (the title of one of his last columns), his understated irony setting him apart from the racy style of his peers on Drum, his moderate views anticipating a rainbow nation inclusivity. His liberal humanism makes him heir to the legacy of Sol Plaatje, a legacy continued by contemporary columnists like Justice Malala and Jacob Dlamini. 1 My interest in Nakasa is in his representation of place and space, and I argue that he is one of South Africa’s first literary flaneurs. As a stroller through the streets, an urban spectator, part journalist, part sociologist, his modernist writings of the metropolis celebrate Johannesburg and also place him in a broad international context. Seen from the perspective of De Certeau’s practice of everyday life, Nakasa’s survival strategies, his ‘tactics of the habitat’, in Foucault’s phrase, become subversive ruses, a navigation through the cultural seam of South Africa in the 1960s, and this approach offers an alternative to a reductionist anti-apartheid critique. The original idea for this dissertation was to encompass several South African writers and their representation of place during the official apartheid era; but I found myself drawn more and more to the writing of one man, Nat Nakasa, and in many ways it is Nakasa who found me. His work has yielded unexpected riches, particularly when viewed through the gauze template of current urban thinking, of walking the city, from the perspective of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau, and the presence he wrested from what for the broad populace was a dehumanizing era. Though he is a part of the Drum generation, he has a different voice from the jazzy violence of their language and experience, and he is the least flamboyant of the hard- drinking, womanizing, hedonistic set dubbed the Fifties People. A modernist who believed in the progress and possibilities of the city, and particularly of Johannesburg, his ability to navigate through racial boundaries, exploring the sutures that both held together and separated the diverse groups, anticipates a time beyond apartheid. His laconic self-effacing style, his modesty, irony and dry humour, his ability to tell a tale well and briefly, combine dispassionate observation with a humane concern for individuals. These earned him a place as the first black columnist on the Rand Daily Mail, employed to represent both the views and conditions across the colour line. Some of his more famous peers, Lewis Nkosi and Es’kia Mphahlele in particular, have dismissed his work and style as shallow; yet the more I read, the more depth I found in his writing, which has been subjected to very little critical examination to date. His paradoxical position as an insider/outsider epitomizes the dilemma of many moderates during the apartheid era, critical of the inherent injustices of the time yet 2 reluctant to be drawn into radical positions, and thus in danger of being labeled apartheid (or colonial) sell-outs. English is his preferred medium, as a global form of communication, and his identity veers between the wider world this offers and an ethnic nativism he discovered in the United States, when influenced by the ‘return to roots’ of African-American thinking. The process of research into his work, of finding Nakasa, took me to strange places, with strange results. I had been wrestling for months with Nakasa’s enigmatic persona, as there seems to be an impenetrable barrier between the cool confidence and the optimism of his professional writing, and the deep and lonely anguish of a man who could take his own life in a foreign city. Many of his friends and former colleagues whom I planned to interview had recently died, or remembered too little to be of value; hoping to find more material than the feature articles and columns contained in the only published book of his work, The World of Nat Nakasa (edited by Essop Patel), I turned to the remnants of the SAAN cuttings library which were then stored at the University of the Witwatersrand. As he was a columnist for the Rand Daily Mail there should have been a file of his writing included in this thematic, topical, authored collection. This pursuit of the Native of Nowhere led me to a disused basement with a shady past. It was once the site of vivisection experiments, according to Michelle Pickover, the curator in charge of the SA Historical and Literary Papers housed in the William Cullen Building (part of the library of the University of the Witwatersrand), and before that, for nuclear experiments by the Department of Physics during the final stages of Second World War. Pickover is a concerned animal rights activist for whom these experiments, and this place, are anathema and she held the key, literally, to the building where the SAAN cuttings had been housed – though dumped might be a better description of this neglected collection. (The historical background to the collection is this: that in 1985 the South African Associated Newspaper group had fallen on hard times. The group consisted of the Sunday Times; the Rand Daily Mail; the Financial Mail; the Cape Times, and the Daily Dispatch, and when their collective debt had spiralled downward to what was then the mammoth amount of R45 million, the company was forced to sell its building and printing presses. They moved to new offices in Diagonal Street (a diamond- 3 shaped building considered an acme of modernism in downtown Johannesburg), which were too small to house the substantial library of thematic cuttings, particularly as it was obvious even in the mid-1980s that the future would be electronic. This collection does not include bound copies of the full newspaper editions, which were held in several libraries, including the Johannesburg Public Library. The company retained some of the cuttings, but older material from this collection was offered to the University of the Witwatersrand, which already had documents in its archival collection from many of South Africa's liberal institutions; the South African Institute of Race Relations, the Progressive Party, and the Church of the Province of South Africa.