Nominations open for 2010 Nat Nakasa Award

The Print Media SA's Awards Committee, SANEF and the Nieman Society of Southern Africa will award a R20 000 prize and a certificate to any media practitioner - journalist, editor, manager or owner - who has:

• Shown integrity and reported fearlessly;
  
• Displayed a commitment to serve the people of South Africa;
  
• Tenaciously striven to maintain a publication or other medium despite insurmountable obstacles;
  
• Resisted any censorship;
  
• Shown courage in making information available to the SA public;
  
• Any combination of the above

Nat Nakasa

Born Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa in 1937, he spent the major part of his adult life as a journalist in Johannesburg, a regular contributor to the Golden City Post, an assistant editor of Drum and later as the first black columnist on the Rand Daily Mail. At the height of his career in 1963, he founded a literary tell-it-like-it-is journal called The Classic. The magazine's main objective was to encourage “. . .those writers with causes to fight for, committed men and women who look at human situations and see tragedy and love, bigotry and common sense for what they are.”

In 1964, he was awarded the Nieman Fellowship to read journalism at the University of Harvard and eventually, Nat ‘gained his freedom' in the form of an exit permit and, although missing his first flight out of the country, safely made it into the US. He was not crazy about New York and quickly moved on to Cambridge where life at Harvard was spent “steeped in the sombre business of education.”

Although the Harvard year was good on the learning front, things went downhill from there, he grew increasingly homesick, isolated and unhappy and committed suicide on 14 July 1965. He was buried at the Ferncliff cemetery outside New York not far from the grave of Malcolm X, far from the country he knew and loved so well.

Submit your nominations, accompanied by a motivation of 300 words to or fax +27 (0) 111 551-9650 for attention Malesedi Dlamini.