Breyten Breytenbach, anti-apartheid writer in exile, passes away at 85

Breyten Breytenbach, a dissident South African-born poet, memoirist and former political prisoner who was jailed on trumped-up charges for anti-apartheid actions in the 1970s, died Sunday in Paris, his longtime place of residence as an expatriate critic of his homeland. He was 85.

His death was announced by his family, who did not state a cause.

Breytenbach was often called the greatest living poet writing in Afrikaans, the language of the dominant white group in South Africa, though he spent almost all of his adult life abroad and was livid that his native tongue became a symbol of racist domination.

“To be an Afrikaner is a political definition,” he wrote in 1985. “It is a blight and a provocation to humanity.”

His loathing of apartheid’s institutionalization of white supremacy began in personal experience. In 1962, Breytenbach married a Vietnamese-born woman, Hoang Lien Ngo, but because of South Africa’s laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, she was refused entry to the country.

The couple settled in Paris, where Breytenbach wrote poetry in Afrikaans and prose in English, including a four-volume memoir of his experiences in South Africa. His best-known work, “The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist,” published in 1985, recounted his seven years in prison in Pretoria, including two in solitary confinement.

“They took seven years from him, and he has now struck back with a volume that seems to have been ripped from his entrails,” Joseph Lelyveld, a former South Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote of the memoir in the lead review of the Feb. 10, 1985, issue of The New York Times Book Review.

Breytenbach was convicted on dubious charges under the Terrorism Act after he visited South Africa on a false passport in 1975 while working with a group allied with the African National Congress, South Africa’s main anti-apartheid organization.

The government chose to prosecute him as a dangerous revolutionary.

Promised leniency if he pleaded guilty and apologized to the prime minister, whom he had called a butcher in a poem, Breytenbach complied. But authorities double-crossed him, and he received a nine-year sentence.

In solitary confinement, he could see only the feet of the guards who delivered his meals. He was held for part of the time on death row, where he witnessed hundreds of Black inmates being led to the gallows. He was also bitter about the ANC, which he accused of failing to support him in prison.

“His imprisonment,” the Times wrote on his release in 1982, two years before the end of his sentence, “backfired because it hastened the disillusion of a whole generation of young writers and artists who regarded him as their most important voice.”

Breyten Breytenbach, one of five siblings, was born Sept. 16, 1939, in Bonnievale, a town in Western Cape province. His father was a farmer and a storekeeper. An older brother, Jan, became an officer in the South African army and led Black troops in assaults into Angola during that country’s civil war.

Jan, his brother wrote, persuaded him to cooperate with the authorities at his trial, a source of lasting anger.

At the age of 20, Breyten left South Africa for Europe to continue his education. He studied painting in Paris and published his first volume of poetry, “The Iron Cow Must Sweat,” in 1964.

When his wife, known as Yolande, was declared nonwhite under South Africa’s apartheid laws, Breytenbach became a permanent Parisian exile. On his release from prison, he attained French citizenship. He also spent long summers in Spain and part of the year in Senegal, on Gorée Island, a former port in the slave trade, where he helped found the Goree Institute to promote African democracy.

He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Daphnée; and two grandsons.

In addition to writing poetry, plays and fiction, Breytenbach was a painter. His canvases of surrealist animals and human figures have been exhibited in Paris, New York and, in 1993, as apartheid was being dismantled, Cape Town.

Besides “True Confessions,” his other memoirs were “A Season in Paradise” (1973), about a brief visit to South Africa when the country granted him a three-month visa; “Return to Paradise” (1991), occasioned by a repeat trip with his wife; and “Dog Heart: A Memoir” (1999).

The volumes are hardly the stuff of conventional travelogues; they are a subjective collage of impressions, lyricism, self-deprecation and cynicism about politics heaped on by the shovelful. “Dog Heart” recounts a sojourn to the valley of his birth and his disillusionment with the violence and political sloganeering of the post-apartheid country he had gone to prison to bring about.

Novelist and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman, writing in The Times Book Review, called it a “dreamlike memoir” written by “a man who once believed enough in liberation to risk his life for it, suffering seven years of incarceration as a political prisoner, and is now a bitter outsider who does not like the future he struggled for.”