By Thackwray (Dax) Driver
THIS is a tribute not to a person but to a friendship; a friendship going back over sixty years between my father, Jonty Driver, who died in May 2023, and Winston Nagan, who died in March 2025.[1] This was a friendship first forged in the turmoil and intrigue of early 1960s South African student political opposition to the apartheid regime and then blossoming through a shared exiled experience in Oxford University in the UK, and then continued over four continents and decades of stop-overs on trips, family holidays and perhaps most of all through correspondence: initial airmail letters and postcards and later emails.
A portrait of Winston Nagan, accompanying his curriculum vitae on the website of the University of Florida, where he was based for many years.
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The first connection between Winston and my father, Jonty, was also through correspondence. In early 1963, Winston had become the representative of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) at the University College of Fort Hare, while Jonty, a student at the University of Cape Town, had been elected the national President of NUSAS a few months earlier. NUSAS was the organization that represented students in all South African universities, but the very nature of the South African education system at the time meant that it was dominated by white students. The leadership of NUSAS was actively involved in political opposition to the apartheid state and, at a time when the main resistance organisations (including the ANC and PAC) were banned, it was one of the most important legal political opposition voices. One of the main issues facing NUSAS in the early 1960s was the relationship they should have with the liberation movement.
Officially, NUSAS was banned by the university authorities at Fort Hare, but Jonty, in the head office in Cape Town, would receive long, hand-written reports on activities on the campus. Confusingly, each was signed with a different name; but Jonty soon realized that each had the same handwriting; Winston signed each one with a different name knowing that they were likely to all be opened and read by the state Security Branch.
Winston and Jonty were both from the Eastern Cape, but with very different backgrounds. My father was the son of an Anglican clergyman, descended from the English white South African 1820 Settlers and had attended the elite St Andrews School in Grahamstown (Makhanda). Winston’s father was Indian and a waiter in a hotel in Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha). Winston’s mother was white, with the good Afrikaner surname of Hendriks. In 1948, the “Immorality Act” was passed making it illegal for people of different racial classifications to be married. Winston’s mother left the family and went back to Natal. According to Jonty, his children never saw her again. Despite these very different backgrounds, and initially meeting through complex politics, Winston and Jonty became lifelong friends.
Meetings between NUSAS officials and students at Fort Hare had to be arranged secretly and at short notice. Sometimes the meetings were held in the middle of the rugby pitch with everyone lying on their stomachs, so headlights from passing police cars would pass over them. Debates at Fort Hare were vigorous and there was an ever-present danger of spies and of agents provocateurs trying to cause problems. There were many young men who were part of the discussion who went on to become important leaders of the struggle against apartheid: Chris Hani, Griffiths Mxenge, Templeton Mdlalana, Seretse Chaobi, Stephen Gawe, Barney Pityana and many more. Many of them died too young; many violently, murdered by the apartheid state.
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A slight aside from the story of a friendship: I am not certain of the exact content of the debates at Fort Hare but based on the descriptions in my father’s posthumously published memoir of his early years,[2] it would seem that a lot of discussions there in 1963 and 1964 concerned the role of black students in the white dominated NUSAS. I also suspect that these conversations feed directly into the rise of Black Consciousness, strongly associated with Fort Hare and the South African Students Organisation.
One of the things that Jonty believed strongly (and which made him unpopular with many of his white student colleagues, not to mention the government) was that African students had to lead the student political mobilization: in his words written in 1964 “NUSAS must turn its leadership over to Africans. I do not mean by this that the white students must say to the black, “You must take over the leadership of NUSAS,” But the whites must say to the blacks, “If you want to lead us, we shall follow you …” [3]
Jonty and Winston were both approached to join the African Resistance Movement (ARM), a group of young radicals, mainly associated with the Liberal Party, who believed that more direct action, including sabotage of critical infrastructure, as needed to confront the apartheid state. Neither of them actually joined, but both were suspected of being members and where high on the Security Branch’s list of undesirables for their public opposition to the apartheid state. In 1964, when the Security Police busted ARM, Jonty was picked up and held in police detention.
By then Winston had already secured a scholarship to read law at Brasenose College, Oxford and just as importantly had managed to get himself a passport in his mother’s name, Hendriks (which was on his birth certificate). The Security Police were looking for Winston Nagan, but he managed to board a Union Castle ship for London under the name Hendriks and for good measure hid in the deepest bathrooms he could find in the bowels of the ship until it set sail.
Jonty Driver (with pen) at the NUSAS Congress, 1964. Seated to his right is Reinier Lock. Image: Estate of C.J. Driver, as reproduced in Dayspring: A Memoir.
Jonty had managed to hide his passport when he was picked up by the Security Police, and on his release after sixty days detention in solitary confinement, he was able to secure a plane ticket to London. Nobody stopped him when he boarded the flight, and he too went into exile in the UK.
It was in those early years in exile that the friendship really developed. After a year teaching at Sevenoaks School, Jonty joined Winston at Oxford. They were then also joined by Maeder Osler, who had been Jonty’s close political ally at NUSAS and took over the presidency when Jonty was forced to step down after his arrest.
Those years in Oxford really cemented a friendship. With no families – or indeed countries – to return to in the holidays, they formed a tight unit and forged a close friendship. My father often spoke of the Christmases they shared and the feasts they managed to throw together, sharing stories of home with the other South Africans, and various other stranded Africans. Jonty wrote in particular of the stories shared by Sam Nolutshungu, the renowned academic, about his childhood in Transkei and the almost unbearable nostalgia for a time and place that now seemed beyond reach.
After Oxford they went their separate ways. Maeder returned to South Africa. Winston took up a postgraduate position in North Carolina and Jonty went back to teaching and novel writing in Sevenoaks. They all married and began to build their own families.
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This is where the importance of correspondence came to the fore. My father, Jonty, was simply an excellent correspondent. He would always write friends and family thoughtful and interesting letters (though in the days before email with terrible, tiny, hard to decipher handwriting). When he died in 2023, one of the themes that repeated in the flood of condolences was people saying how thankful they has been to receive a letter from him at some crucial point in their lives: words of encouragement to ex-students who had not done as well as they had expected in exams, condolences to people who had lost a family member, celebrations of success.
Correspondence by email was the basis of my relationship with my father in the thirty years I have lived on the other side of the Atlantic. In the past almost two years since his death, I have often missed him most when some global political insanity has taken place (and there have been a lot of those recently) or I felt moved by a novel, and I would have always exchanged emails with him about the incident or the book.
I am not sure if Winston was as brilliant a correspondent as my father, but I suspect he must have been because their friendship certainly endured the early years of them both establishing careers and families, Winston in the USA, Jonty in England and for a period in Hong Kong. And then in the 1980s, with Winston globe-trotting as a highly respected academic lawyer and Jonty taking up a post as headmaster of Berkhamsted school, not too far from Heathrow, the friends were suddenly able to meet regularly again.
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It was at this point that Winston came into my life. This fascinating South Africa/American human rights academic would pitch up in our small English town with enthralling stories from Uganda, Ecuador or some intrigue from the United Nations. He made a big impression on me, an idealistic teenager, and inspired me to go to SOAS. He would leave behind academic papers on human rights, which I would try to read but admit now to finding largely impenetrable.
And he made my father, Jonty, happy. They had an almost impish delight in each other’s company, talking about the old days, sport, politics, friends and family, drinking beer, wine and brandy. Cricket was especially important for Winston, who, living in Florida, was starved of the game he loved. On one visit through England, he asked Jonty to get him a game with a local team. Jonty managed to use his headmasterly clout to get him a game with a team largely made up of young teachers from Berkhamsted. They looked skeptical about Winston’s abilities, with his then physique more resembling a middle-aged academic than the sportsman he had been in his youth. But Winston’s muscle memory was still there and he managed to valiantly defend his wicket against a particularly aggressive young fast bowler, who Jonty was convinced was fuelled with racist venom. To Jonty’s huge delight and pride, Winston was not out, and the game was drawn.
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In the years since the 1990s and the unwinding of apartheid, both Winston and Jonty were able to travel back to South Africa. Winston and Jonty and their respective families met up there, in England, France and Florida on family vacations and other trips. Maeder Osler’s family farm, Hanglip, near Colesberg in the Karoo, was an especially important meeting point and became a spiritual touchpoint. While Jonty was frequently in South Africa, he happily kept his base in an old Tudor wooden cottage in bucolic East Sussex, writing poetry, essays, articles and letters to friends.
A portrait of Winston Nagan, published during his stint as a visiting fellow at the Stellenbosch University Institute for Advanced Study (Stias) in 2016.
At one point, Winston took the decision to return full time to South Africa, hoping for a senior judicial appointment. Somehow, this dream did not materialize. Exactly why Winston was not able to turn his undoubted academic success and reputation in the United States into a senior judicial role in the new South Africa is a story that remains to be told. I do not know the reasons, but in his 2018 tribute, Jonty hinted that Winston was the victim of some political shenanigans as a result of not being aligned with the ANC during the liberation struggle.
Over the past decade, failing health limited the direct meetings as international travel became more of a challenge, exacerbated by the 2020–2022 Covid-related travel restrictions. But the two friends remained in close connection and the love and respect that they felt for each other was palpable. When my father died in 2023, Winston was devastated.
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Shortly after Jonty’s death, my daughter, Rikki, and her American boyfriend had a New York to Florida road trip planned. I made arrangements with Winston’s son, Arthur, for them to meet in Gainsville as a direct connection to celebrate the friendship. Of all of Jonty’s descendants, Rikki is probably the one to have most closely inherited Jonty’s striking good looks (which unfortunately for me skipped a generation). When she was due to meet members of Jonty’s family in South Africa a few years back, he told her “they will recognize you” and they did. So, it somehow felt right that she should be the personal emissary from the Driver family to meet the Nagan family and acknowledge that enduring friendship. She reported a wonderful, warm and fascinating long lunch with conversations spiraling between the personal and the political; a fitting tribute to Jonty and Winston’s friendship.
It was a friendship that first emerged in the darkest days of apartheid repression and endured through the dislocation of exile; the two friends have now crossed to safety. I miss them both and mourn their friendship.
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[1] A lot of the details of this article are taken from a tribute to Winston Nagan written by Jonty Driver on the occasion of Prof Winston Nagan’s Retirement Celebration from the University of Florida, Gainesville, 3 March 2018. As he had just had heart surgery, Jonty was unable to attend, and I delivered the remarks on his behalf.
[2] C. J. Driver (2024) Dayspring, a memoir (edited by J. M. Coetzee), Karavan Press/ uHlanga Press.
[3] C.J. Driver (1964), Paper delivered to NUSAS National Conference 1964. JSTOR Primary Sources , 05-01-1964 https://www.jstor.org/stable/al.sff.document.cnf19640500.026.009.575 (With thanks to Gail M. Gerhart).
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FEATURED IMAGE: Delegates and others at NUSAS Congress, University of Natal, 1964. Jonty Driver is seated in die middle of the front row, with Maeder Osler to his right. Winston is in the back row, second from right (against the window). From the estate of C.J. Driver, as reproduced in Dayspring: A Memoir.
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