Death of Breyten Breytenbach, major poet and fierce opponent of apartheid

Breyten Breytenbach… his name refers to a crazy time, a time when, in South Africa, apartheid dictated its law. There were a few of them who defied the ban, refusing to submit to this racist regime which shot at the black population like one shoots at animals. Among those who spoke out against the racist authorities, a handful of white writers, musicians and intellectuals, all born in the 1930s. André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, Ingrid Jonker or the immense musician of jazz Chris Mc Gregor… and Breyten Breytenbach.

Born in 1939 in Bonnievale into a farming family, Breytenbach grew up in an Afrikaaner environment. He studied fine arts in Cape Town, moved to Paris in the 1960s, and discovered the literary excitement in the French capital. In those years he met Yolande Ngo-Sach-Vinh, a French woman of Vietnamese origin. They get married. But this marriage fell under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act prohibiting, from 1949 to 1985, mixed marriages between whites and people of other colors. He is banned from staying in South Africa.