Out of Africa: Nat Nakasa's Exit Paperwork

This article explores the literary imagination that emerged around the paperwork of the South African apartheid state, especially the bureaucratic ephemera—such as dompasses, passports, passport applications and exit permits—that limited the free movement of black individuals. It turns to the case of the South African journalist Nat Nakasa (1937-65). In a first step, I argue that, in Nakasa’s writings, apartheid’s bureaucratic papers are viewed as material curiosities in order to critique the ironic gap between their artificial nature and the hold they had over individual, predominantly black lives. Then I examine how, after Nakasa’s death in exile, the little magazine he had founded, the Classic, dedicated a memorial issue to the journalist, republishing his writings on, as well as preserving his own engagements with, the state’s bureaucratic ephemera. Its ephemeral nature made the little magazine a fitting counter-archive of apartheid. As I go on to argue, the Classic registered in its fragile material form a sense of the regime’s bureaucratic violence—becoming, in turn, a material curiosity from the mid-apartheid years—and yet it persisted against these odds, and was kept and archived. Such a reading aims to throw the political affordances of the magazine’s ephemerality into relief.