Breyten Breytenbach: Cosmopolitan anarchist from the Boland
I received the news that Breyten Breytenbach had died on Sunday. That evening we drove up from Dikeni (Alice), where we live, to Hogsback. With me were my wife Irma and our friend Vangile, on a visit from Tshwane.
On our way up the Amathole Mountains, we listened to Breytenbach’s spoken-word album Lady One. His Buddhist chants sounded as if they somehow belonged to the green hills and villages of the Eastern Cape.
In Hogsback, at a restaurant, we ordered a good bottle of red wine with our meal. Breyten was mos a Bolander and was appreciative of the produce from its vineyards. As we poured a glass of red wine onto the ground, I recited one of his poems, titled 26 November 1975.
“Camagu,” Vangile responded, using an isiXhosa word to honour the forefathers.
Breytenbach was 85. I expected him to live much longer, because when I last saw him in South Africa, he still moved like a young man.
I attributed this to a lifelong yoga regime. I was unaware that he had suffered from cancer. A few weeks ago he fell, which hastened his demise. He died in Paris, with his wife Huâng Liên Ngo, known to many as Yolande, by his side.
In many ways, Breyten is an ancestor and a role model for those of us who do not fit the mould of the Afrikanerdom of old. He was fiercely Afrikaans but for him Afrikaans was about all those who spoke this creole language. He was both cosmopolitan and rooted in the Boland.
As an artist, his poetry and paintings are sublime. He is arguably one of the greatest poets in the Afrikaans language, alongside Antjie Krog.
As an activist, he had a troubled and complicated relationship with the apartheid establishment and the liberation movement alike.
Breytenbach was born in Bonnievale on 16 September 1939. His parents were Hans and Kitty Breytenbach; his brothers Jan, Cloete, Sebastiaan and sister Rachel. Breyten was the last of the siblings to die.
He grew up in Wellington, where the family ran a shop and a boarding house until 1970. After matriculating in 1957, he studied fine arts and languages at the University of Cape Town and Michaelis.
In Cape Town, he befriended people like Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace; Peter Clarke; Ingrid Jonker; Abraham de Vries and Marius Schoon.
These friendships shaped his life and became the backbone of what was later called the Sestigers, a group of progressive Afrikaans writers who spoke up against apartheid in the very language of the system.
In 1960, Breytenbach left for Europe by boat, settling in Paris to further his studies and to establish himself as a visual artist. While studying at the Sorbonne he met Yolande, whose Vietnamese parents worked in Paris.
They got married in London in 1962 and bought a small apartment in Paris. Breyten also got involved in the anti-apartheid movement.
By this time, his primary professional identity was as a visual artist but after an intervention by Afrikaans author Chris Barnard, a folder of Breyten’s writings was submitted for publication in South Africa.
In 1964, a book of poetry titled Die Ysterkoei Moet Sweet (the iron cow must sweat) and a book of short stories, Katastrofes (catastrophes), were published. Both won literary prizes, which meant a much-needed financial boost back in Paris, as well as considerable recognition in South Africa.
Breytenbach became an influential public figure in the Afrikaans-language establishment, albeit as an outsider critic. His writings were subjected to apartheid censorship and he was snubbed by literary awards such as the Hertzog Prize, the most prestigious Afrikaans-language award.
Controversially, Breyten and Yolande were denied visas to visit South Africa, since their marriage was illegal under the 1949 Mixed Marriages Act.
When, finally, Breyten did visit the county in 1973, he made a speech, saying that Afrikaners were a “bastard people with a bastard language” and that this was a beautiful thing. Afrikaners had to be “manure” that would give life by decomposing.
This caused great offence and consternation in the Afrikaner nationalist establishment.
In France, Breytenbach participated in setting up an organisation called Okhela, with other anti-apartheid Afrikaans-speakers. The organisation was loosely associated with the ANC in exile, but did not fall under its command structures.
In 1975 Breytenbach went undercover and visited South Africa on a false passport as “Christian Galaska”, aiming to establish links between European funders and the emerging trade union movement.
However, he was arrested and sentenced to prison. The poem I recited up on Hogsback, he wrote while the judge read the sentence.
Prison meant two years in solitary confinement, being allowed to write, but not to paint. When his mother died in 1978, permission to attend the funeral was denied.
On the day he received the news of her death, his warder kept the light in his cell on while watching him through the peephole, all night.
His prison poetry won awards overseas but was banned in South Africa.
His release came on 2 December 1982, after pressure from the French government. Breytenbach returned to Paris and became a French citizen in 1983.
His jail memoir, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984), is still his most read book globally.
Eventually, in 1984, Breyten was awarded the Hertzog Prize, but he turned this down, saying that he refused to accept this award while Nelson Mandela was still in jail.
In the late Eighties, he played a key role, with people like Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, in establishing non-state-sponsored communication between the ANC and leading dissident Afrikaner figures.
It culminated in the famed 1987 meeting in Senegal, dubbed the “Dakar Safari” by the antagonistic Afrikaans press.
In 1993, Breytenbach exhibited his paintings and sketches in South Africa for the first time. In a catalogue essay in the book Painting the Eye, he wrote:
“Only anarchy can save us from mayhem. Our innocence was to believe in the kindness of the human spirit and the perfectibility of the human intellect. The anarchy I’m proposing has to do with the unremitting questioning of all shapes and exercises of power.
“The human condition, as far as I’m concerned, ought to be that self-incendiary moment of uprising and derision in the no-time void.
“You have to work through the layering of painting to attain the nakedness of non-being. Along the way the I must be ceaselessly invented, if only to have a (disintegrating) observation post.”
This essay gives one a sense of how Breytenbach connected creative outputs to politics — he was not someone who submitted to political discipline or control.
To be sure, in the 1990s he publicly criticised the new ANC government for authoritarian tendencies and corruption. He also received numerous international accolades, too many to name.
But even while advocating for Afrikaans as an inclusive language, he continued to cause consternation in its cultural establishment.
His play, Boklied (goat song), performed in 1998, caused pandemonium, with Breytenbach vowing to never publish in Afrikaans again.
As Charl Blignaut wrote then in this newspaper about its Klein Karoo Kunstefees premiere: “It was in the air long before the young black actor on stage decided to ditch his trenchcoat and strap-on dildo and settle into his role as Ritsos … buck naked. Before, even, he and Isis set about exploring Tereus’s bared bum, somewhat gleefully sticking a feather up it while drag king Antoinette Kellerman as Farenj ravaged petite little Grethe Fox’s Madonna in the background.”
In this context, when he was awarded the Hertzog Prize again in 1999, Mandela phoned him to request that he accept it, which he did. Nevertheless, in 2005, he turned down an award from then arts and culture minister Pallo Jordan.
In the 2000s he taught creative writing in New York and maintained his involvement with the Goreé Institute in Dakar. He also released several albums, with spoken-word collaborations with musicians.
He arranged literary festivals, often featuring poets from countries where they were imprisoned and persecuted. His close friendship with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish meant that he took a public and principled anti-Israel position.
In February 2007, Breytenbach’s childhood home in Wellington was converted into a community centre and still operates as a hub for art, literature and performing arts.
In South Africa, he is best known as poet and activist, in France as a painter. His poetry volumes often included images, his paintings text, while his e-mails read like poems.
Breytenbach was a truly exceptional human being, one whose life and creative spirit showed that an artistic imagination is by necessity both deeply personal and political.
Andries Bezuidenhout is a scholar, poet, musician and artist.