By PHAKAMISA MAYABA
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 unyielding stance in the fight against repression and injustice, so 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 have been far easier if he – like so many others – had just looked the other way.
Born on the right side of the race and class divide, he could’ve embraced his privilege, sun-tanned by the poolside, erected a massive wall as a buffer from the hardscrabble of his non-white compatriots, and carried on like an ordentlike 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 recruit members for the underground organisation Okhela, or to fraternise with the Mayibuye Group – the ANC’s cultural wing – in London. His writing could’ve been obsequious and compliant, rather than rubbing the authorities up the wrong way, or brazenly flipping the bird at apartheid.
These sorts of activities inevitably attracted the attention of the scowling and brutal men of the apartheid secret service and security police, and there are many stories about what those guys were capable of. This includes an episode involving Andre Brink, one of Breytenbach’s literary contemporaries. After returning from an overseas visit, Brink wrote to a friend, the playwright Anthony Akerman: ‘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 literature’ soon found himself on. When, in 1962, he married Yolande, a Frenchwoman of Vietnamese descent, they fell foul of the the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and Immorality Act, thereby reducing them to persona non grata in the country of his birth. He knew 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:
‘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 1980s, 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.”‘ Two decades later, he would not hesitate to hurl the same sort of language at the post-liberation ANC that had started to exhibit symptoms of unbridled corruption.
Breyten Breytenbach at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival. (Wikimedia Commons)
His seven years in jail, two of them in solitary confinement, inspired one of his most widely read and emotive works, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. In it, he wrote:
‘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 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 awarded the Hertzog Prize, Afrikaans’s highest literary accolade, but turned it down on the grounds that Nelson Mandela was still in prison. 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 the then arts and culture minister Pallo Jordan.
Alongside the likes of Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, he was instrumental in establishing communication links between the exiled ANC and leading members of the Afrikaner community who increasingly realised that apartheid could no longer be defended, resulting in 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.
During a radio interview, Krog 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?”’
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 has called him a ‘ferryman of freedom’. Writers have published notable obituaries, 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
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FEATURED IMAGE: Breyten Breytenbach (right) receives a prize from the Jan Campert Foundation at a a function in The Hague, 20 January 1983. On his right are his wife, Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien, and the mayor of The Hague, Frans Schols. (Wikimedia Commons)
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.
It is a real pity that the very people he was supporting against the dreadful , murdering SB, turned out to be even worse than the leaders before them.
And yet, the people who rule, have still NOT learnt, that greed, is one of the dealiest sins.
Where is that taking South Africans today?? One can only wonder