Death of the South African poet and writer Breyten Breytenbach

A fierce anti-apartheid activist, he went into exile in France in the 1960s and acquired French nationality in 1982. He wrote more than fifty works, novels, essays and collections of poetry.

Lhe South African-born poet and writer Breyten Breytenbach, anti-apartheid activist, died at the age of 85 this Sunday, November 24, in Paris. Along with Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) and André Brink (1935-2015), he was part of a brilliant generation of white South African authors committed against the institutional racism in force in their country until 1991.

Born in 1939 in Bonnievale, a small town in the Cape Province (southwest), Breyten Breytenbach left his native country in the early 1960s to settle in Paris, where he became one of the most influential voices influential in opposing the legal system of apartheid in South Africa. Breyten Breytenbach paid for his activism in favor of equal rights with a seven-year stay in prison, including two years in solitary confinement. In 1975, when he had already been living in France for more than ten years, he had returned clandestinely and illegally – he was married to a woman of Vietnamese origin, but interracial marriages were prohibited in his country – he had been arrested and convicted for terrorism. Released in 1982, he returned to France, where he had lived since then. He was naturalized French in 1982, upon his release from prison.

Although he considered himself, for several years, more of a painter than a writer, Breyten Breytenbach published around fifty books, collections of poetry, novels or texts for the theater, written in Afrikaans and English, including True confession of an albino terrorist (1983), Metamortphase: prison poems 1975-82 (1987) or even Memory of dust and snow (1989). “Immense artist, activist against apartheid, he fought until the end for a better world,” expressed her daughter in the press release in which she announced her death. Adding: “His words, his paintings, his imagination, his resilience will continue to guide us. »