Word: africanization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nakasa's own life is a case in point. An editor of the South African magazine Drum, a weekly columnist, and possibly South Africa's leading African journalist, Nakasa was denied a passport by the South African government which would have enabled him to arrive at the University in time to accept a Nieman Fellowship. Instead, he was given an exit permit, allowing him to come (he arrived two months late), but at the expense of his citizenship. Should he try to return to South Africa, Nakasa faces trial and up to three years' imprisonment--all because of his journalistic...
Going to jail is, for the African, as for the American Negro, a way to assert his identity. Another way is to turn to journalism, a path shown to Nakasa by his father, a compositor and free lance newspaperman in Durban on South Africa's East Coast...
After dropping out of high school for lack of money, Nakasa worked for a year "running messages for white boys," before he got a job making tea in the offices of the local newspaper for Africans, the Natal Sun. Within a month he was writing stories, and after a year he travelled 400 miles north to the golden city of Johannesburg, where he went to work for a major South African paper, the Post, and its sister publication, Drum. In addition to his work there, Nakasa founded a literary quarterly, Crisis (with contributors ranging from Doris Lessing to Leopold Senghor...
...urban African, Nakasa argues, is the person most torn by apartheid. "I am supposed to be a Pondo," wrote Nakasa in one of his last articles before leaving South Africa, "but I don't even know the language of that tribe. I was brought up in a Zulu-speaking home, yet I can no longer think in Zulu because that language cannot cope with the demands of our day. I have never owned an assegai or any of those magnificent Zulu shields. Neither do I propose to wear tribal dress when I go to the U.S. I am just...
Nakasa is pessimistic about South Africa's chances for racial harmony, or for African majority rule--at least in the forseeable future. "Everything has been done which could have made for understanding," he says, "but the white man's conception of himself is based on hallucinations of superiority. As long as you have this element you destroy the very foundations on which you could build a settlement...