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 but lacking citizenship in the United States, a place that he was beginning to feel offered little respite from the brutal racism of his own country. 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. In a short but vibrant career as a writer and editor in the apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and early ’60s, Nakasa penned features for the country’s most influential black news magazine, Drum, became the first black columnist for the Rand Daily Mail [...] and founded a literary journal, The Classic, to publish African writing. By the time he was in his mid-20s, he had written for the New York Times and been invited to Harvard to study journalism. But like so many South African intellectuals of his generation, leaving his homeland was not simply a matter of deciding to go. It was also a matter of deciding never to come back.