A native of nowhere

de Ryan Brown

"On a warm July morning in 1965, South African writer Nat Nakasa stood facing the window of a friend's seventh floor apartment in Central Park West. ...Less than a year earlier, Nakasa had taken an "exit permit" from the apartheid government - a one-way ticket out of the country of his birth - and come to Harvard University on a journalism fellowship. Now he was caught in a precarious limbo, unable to return to South Africa ... He was, he had written, a "native of nowhere... a stateless man [and] a permanent wanderer", and he was running out of hope. Standing in that New York City apartment building, he faced the alien city. Then he jumped. He was 28 years old." -- Publishers's website.