From New York Times
On a July morning nearly half a century ago, Nat Nakasa, a black South African living in exile in New York, plummeted from a seventh-story window on Central Park West and 102nd Street in Manhattan, suffering multiple fractures and internal injuries. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Knickerbocker Hospital in Harlem. Nakasa was 28 years old.
Just 10 months earlier, he had left his home country to take a Nieman journalism fellowship at Harvard University. Because he wrote articles the apartheid government abhorred, officials denied him a passport. They offered an exit permit — a one-way ticket out of the country — daring him to renounce his South African citizenship.
“If I shall leave this country and decide not to come back,” he wrote in 1964, “it will be because of a desire to avoid perishing in my own bitterness — a bitterness born of being reduced to a second-class citizen.”
With key leaders of the liberation movement, including Nelson Mandela, sent to prison, and the government cracking down on writers, Nakasa chose the exit permit. In his final column for The Rand Daily Mail, “A Native of Nowhere,” he wrote of “taking a grave step” and becoming “a stateless person, a wanderer.”
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