Nat Nakasa returns home to Chesterville

@SITHOLEEXPRESS

The remains of the renowned anti-apartheid journalist Nat Nakasa will finally be laid to rest on Saturday at his home township in Chesterville west of Durban.

Chesterville was established around 1942 and is part of Greater Cato Manor Region, which includes Cato Crest, Bonella, Wiggins, Umkhumbane and Ridge View. In 1939 plans were drawn up for a new township at Blackhurst Estate, later named Chesterville.

Nakasa completed his high school education in Eshowe in 1955. He became part of a circle of writers and intellectuals in the city of Durban.

The Chesterville Cultural Club was his first cultural initiative. Nakasa intended it to be a forum for discussion of literature and debate over their own writing, and the state of nation as it then stood.

Nakasa’s career as a writer also began in Durban, when in 1956, he joined the staff of the Zulu language newspaper Ilanga lase Natal, where he became a journalist.

Nat Nakasa funeral- Chesterville, Durban

Chesterville community members gathered at Nat Nakasa's family home in Chesterville, Durban, to bid farewell to his remains ahead of the re-burial on 13 September 2014.

 

Nakasa, whose body was exhumed from the Ferncliff Cemetery in the United States, will be reburied on September 13, at the Heroes' Acre in the Chesterville cemetery.

It is a section of the old established Wiggins Road cemetery, also known as Ezinkawini, in Chesterville.

This is one of the oldest cemeteries in KwaZulu-Natal. It was opened in the 1920s and has accommodated more than 50 000 burials.

The Heroes Acre is a new section which was opened after 1994 in order to accommodate those people who were heroes and heroines of our struggle for freedom and social justice in South Africa, most of which were come from eThekwini.

Some of the heroes that Nakasa will be buried with are Johannes Mkhonto Mkhwanazi; Bongani Nduli; Mthethwa Samuel Nkosiyezwe, KZN legislature's longest serving member;  Stix Nduduzo Mdletshe a former MK operative,  Sipho Vusumuzi Bhengu, a former MK member and Albert Dlomo a member of the ANC and former political prisoner.

Nakasa's remains were repatriated to South Africa a month ago. He left South Africa on an exit permit during the apartheid regime to take up a Nieman Fellowship in Harvard.

Click here to watch: Durban's Chesterville Cemetery to be turned into an open air museum 

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This article first appeared on SABCNews site.It was done by Sthembiso Sithole (@SITHOLEEXPRESS) on Twitter.