As the posts flooded my timeline in the wake of Breyten Breytenbach’s passing last Sunday, one question in particular gnawed at me. Had South Africa taken adequate stock of the renowned poet’s selflessness in his unyielding stance in the fight against repression and injustice as not to downplay his role?
Now that it has become a popular flex amongst the political class to whip out one’s Struggle and anti-apartheid credentials, Breytenbach’s contributions stand out especially because his life would’ve been unencumbered if he could – like so many did – only bring himself to looking the other way.
Born on the right side of the race and class divide, he could’ve embraced his privilege; suntanned by the poolside, erected a massive wall as a buffer from the hardscrabble of his non-white compatriots and carried on like an ordentliker Afrikaner.
There certainly was no need to complicate things by co-founding the Sestigers (also known as the Beweging van Sestig), ‘a group of progressive Afrikaans writers who spoke up against apartheid in the very language of the system’ in 1961. He had no business sneaking into the country to do some furtive trade union organising and to recruit members for the international organisation Okhela as well as to fraternise with the Mayibuye Group – the ANC’s cultural wing – in London. His writing could’ve taken obsequious and compliant tones that avoided rubbing the status quo up the wrong way or brazenly flipping the bird at apartheid.
Such soirees inevitably invited the attention of the scowling and cruel men from the secret service and there were apocryphal stories about what those guys were capable of. As the Playwright Anthony Akerman writes in his memoir, Lucky Bastard, of his correspondence with Andre Brink, another of Breytenbach’s literary contemporaries: ‘After [Brink] arrived back in South Africa, he wrote: “Landed with something of a jolt when I was awaited by the SB [the police’s security branch] and informed, very pleasantly, that they’d followed my every move over there.”’
But that is exactly the hard road ‘the bad boy of Afrikaner literarure,’ soon found himself on. By the time he married ‘Yolande,’ a French woman of Vietnamese ancestry in 1962, he’d effectively reduced himself to persona non grata in light of the draconian Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and Immorality Act (1950). He knew that he’d probably never be allowed back home as long as apartheid still existed. In My Traitor’s Heart, the ‘book that made me briefly famous,’ Rian Malan beautifully writes of one of Breytenbach’s most storied visits to the country:
‘The great Boer poet spent the sixties in exile in Paris and most of the seventies in a South African prison, paying for his role in a quixotic ”terrorist” plot. In the eighties, however, he won Afrikanerdom’s foremost literary award and returned from exile to receive it. Five hundred tuxedoed members of the High Afrikaner Establishment turned out to witness the ceremony.
‘Breytenbach told them that they were disgusting. He said he could not breathe in South Africa for the stench of moral hypertrophy. The word Afrikaner, he added, had become synonymous with ‘spiritual
backwardness, ethical decay, cruelty, dehumanization, armed baboon
bandits, and the stigma of brutal violence.”‘ Such was his attitude at the system that had white SA hanging their heads in shame but which he would not hesitate to hurl at a post-liberation ANC that had started to exhibit symptoms of unbridled corruption.
It was his incarceration where he spent seven years in jail, two of them in solitary confinement that inspired one of his most widely read and emotive work, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist in 1984. A standalone wordsmith, he writes: ‘When first I came out of prison I was thrown into emptiness and I found all space around me cluttered. For so long had I been conditioned to the simplification of four walls, the square of a barred window, a double square door, a square bed, emptiness, nowhere to hide the smallest illegal object, nowhere to hide the crust of bread to which you were not entitled, nowhere to efface yourself, or tuck away the soul or to protect your three dreams from prying eyes and acquisitive fingers, nowhere to hide your anguish: All these had been erased by being made apparent.’
His jailers, we’ve heard, were particularly spiteful. When his mother passed away in 1978, the state denied him permission to attend the funeral and the on-duty warder kept the light in his cell on so he could watch him through the peephole all night. In 1984, after years of being snubbed, he was ultimately awarded the Hertzog Prize, Afrikaans’s highest literary accolade which, owing to that Nelson Mandela was still in prison, decided to turn it down. After a phone call from Mandela in 1999 urging him to accept the same prize, Breytenbach would agree only to turn down an award from then arts and culture minister Pallo Jordan.
Alongside the likes of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, he was also instrumental in establishing communication links between the exiled ANC and leading members of the Afrikaner community increasingly realising that apartheid could no longer be defended. Their efforts would culminate into what would be dubbed the ‘Dakar Safari’. In France he is most famous as a painter, here at home as an activist and a poet whose words inspired a generation of poets, one of them Antjie Krog.
On a radio interview she said: ‘Breyten’s writing was radical, but he was the first poet, I almost want to say writer, who also lived radically. Breyten confronted us with that thing of, ”Okay, you’re against apartheid, but how are you living against apartheid.”‘
In the aftermath of his death, President Cyril Ramaphosa has acknowledged him as a ‘humanist whose strident and sustained literary assault on apartheid and its enforcers and endorsers traversed bookstores, domestic bookshelves, lecture halls, art galleries and theatre stages around the world.’ The French presidency called him a ‘ferryman of freedom.’ Writers have published notable orbituaries but the towering poet breathes no more. Apart from his ashes, all we have of his memory are his words, powerful and flagrant:
it is said poetry completes
what history leaves out
black like death
my beloved
my beloved
I’m so glad we live in peaceful times