Narrative
The World of Nat Nakasa
Nat Nakasa · 1975
Synopsis
The volume brings together columns, reports and essays given to the press between the late 1950s and 1965. The columns written for the Johannesburg daily bring the white reader into township life, tin whistles, thugs with machetes, hemp and passes, and speak of both the magic and the terror of Johannesburg. The author also speaks of himself there, of an identity hard to pin down, of the public and private black self, and of the departure that will make him, in his own words, “a native of nowhere”.
Context
The columns had first been collected in 1966 in a tribute issue of The Classic. The book was put together by Essop Patel, who began his research in the reading room of the British Museum, and was published in Johannesburg in 1975, by Ravan, with an introduction by Nadine Gordimer. According to a critic in the Mail & Guardian, Patel cut the sharpest passages so as not to offend the censors. The collection was reissued in 1985, then in 2005 with a critical essay by Mongane Wally Serote.
Who it is for
Short press pieces, in English, easy to approach without prior knowledge of the country; not translated into French.
Prizes and reception
It brings together what its 2005 publisher presents as the best writings of the first Black columnist of a major white daily in the country.
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