He was homesick in his own country

Although I did not know Nat Nakasa, I knew Drum magazine.

To me, it stood for a defiant refusal to dignify apartheid - by subverting it, by exposing its cruel stupidity, by sending it up. It celebrated life, energy and laughter, it was mischievous and daring, and heaven knows those things were in short supply in South Africa in the '50s and '60s.

I knew Lewis Nkosi over the years; he was my chief link to the Drum generation, and to Nakasa. As the first black South African to win a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard, Nkosi led the way for Nakasa, who followed a little later.

I think of the Drum writers as among the most gifted we have produced. And the most unlucky. Almost all of them ended in exile, unhappiness, booze or silence. When I talked to Lewis about Nat, it was always Nat's irreverence, his couldn't-give-a-damn attitude I tuned into. He simply would not play the race card. He preferred to mock it.

And when I learnt about the time Nat and Lewis decided that they needed a white maid, and advertised for one, I was blown away. To come up with this idea in darkest apartheid Johannesburg - that was classy stuff. That cheered me up. Anyone who could do that got my vote. I guess that's when I first had the idea of writing about Nat.

From Lewis I had the sense of how lost Nat was in the US. There is a wonderful line in one of Nat's essays about the mixture that made him what he was. Everyone in his life, including the white security cops who followed him, to Mandela and the Treason Trialists, to his Durban home, to his Sophiatown salad days. "I am all of them," he writes.

He was far ahead of his time. South Africans, he knew, are a work in progress. That meant even his friends did not understand him. He was homesick, of course, long before he left home - for a place where he would not be illegal in his own land.

Years ago when I read that Nat's trip to Harvard had been funded by the CIA, I knew what his reaction would have been - he would have laughed.

When I wrote A Distant Drum I wanted it to be a tribute. That meant getting his spirit right: his defiance, his humour, his sassiness. I also wanted to show what killed him - a kind of terminal homesickness. He took an exit permit and if you did that, you knew you were not coming back.

Many of the Sophiatown generation idolised the US and when Nat went off to Harvard, then to Harlem and Manhattan, reality was nothing like he imagined. New York was not the movie he was hoping to see. The most moving thing he ever said was at the end: "If I can't laugh, I can't write."

It is the laughter I hear, and it runs through my play. It puts Nat back in New York where he died and where he lay buried a few graves away from Malcolm X - something else that would have made him smile.

What I have written is not a tragedy. That would have been the wrong thing. It is a dark comedy, like so much of South African life, where you are never quite sure whether to laugh or cry, so you do a bit of both.

As for coming home, as he did recently: in so many ways, I think he never really left.

A Distant Drum premieres at the Andre Huguenet Theatre in Bloemfontein on October 13 and 14 before moving to New York, where it will be performed at Carnegie Hall on October 28 as part of the UBUNTU: Music and Arts of South Africa festival. Nat Ramabulana plays the role of Nakasa. Christiaan Schoombie plays an apartheid policeman and later an American professor. South African ethnomusicologist Andrew Tracey is musical supervisor. Hope's son, violinist Daniel Hope, has curated the production, which is directed by Jerry Mofokeng.