A Native of Nowhere by Ryan Brown

Author:Ryan Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Just as The Classic kicked into gear, however, Nat began to express a deep irritation with life in South Africa, repeatedly complaining to friends and colleagues that he ‘felt like hopping on the next plane to go seek my fortune outside this hole’. Even fringe country had lost its sheen. One night the playwright and director Barney Simon invited Nat to a party at the house of an English academic they both knew. The parties were a regular occurrence, and Nat often dropped in, but that evening, Barney remembered, the gathering was particularly raucous. ‘People were twisting wildly, singing with the record at the top of their voices,’ he wrote, ‘heads were thrown back, bodies bounced against one another.’ Nat took one look at the scene, re-buttoned his coat and wheeled around to leave. When Barney tried to pull him back in, he snapped, asking if his friend realised that ‘most of the blacks we were carousing with were dangerous gangsters and whores’.32 On another occasion, Nat introduced Barney to a writer he had just published in The Classic, a former gangster and general rabble-rouser named Dugmore Boetie. Barney remembered being fascinated by the man, ‘relishing all the rogue that showed’, but Nat, ‘sophisticated, urbane, was irritated by him’.33 To Barney, Nat appeared to have lost his patience for the dangerous and often limited world he and his friends inhabited. He was restless, and he wanted out.

Nat’s frustration with fringe country was compounded by the growing danger of publishing literature in South Africa. In the autumn of 1963, he was forced to reject a short story submitted to The Classic because it was ‘too hot to handle because [of] a rather bold bedroom angle’, which Nat realised could catch the eye of the government censors and could spell death to the entire magazine.34 Anything the National Party didn’t want in print, it had the power to keep out of the public’s reach, and he knew it.

That same year, Parliament had passed the Publications and Entertainment Act, a piece of legislation that, much like the Suppression of Communism Act, granted the state broad powers to ban or censor content it deemed unfavourable. This time around, the list included anything that was ‘harmful to public morals’, blasphemous, ridiculed ‘any section of the inhabitants of the Republic’, or posed a danger to the general peace.35 The targets, simply put, were politics, sex and blasphemy. While many anti-apartheid writings naturally fell victim to this law, it also ensnared a vast number of other publications, among them Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, eventually resulting in the censorship of a staggering 15,000 books and newspapers.36 In 1964 an issue of the leftist political magazine The New African was banned ostensibly on the grounds of a single phrase contained within it – ‘shit-scared’.37 For editors like Nat, it was nearly impossible to know what would trip the wires and catch the government’s attention.

As censorship slowly advanced, it collided with a vicious new wave of

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