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Breyten Breytenbach, a celebrated anti-apartheid writer and activist who was imprisoned in South Africa during the 1970s for his outspoken opposition to the regime, has passed away at the age of 85, his family announced.
Breyten Breytenbach passed away in his sleep in Paris, accompanied by his wife Yolande during his final moments, his family revealed.
In their statement, the family hailed him as “an immense artist and an unwavering opponent of apartheid,” adding that he “continued his fight for a better world until the very end.”
Breytenbach’s razor-sharp mind garnered him immense respect, with the British satirical TV show Spitting Image once dubbing him “the only nice South African” in a song, a nod to his stance during apartheid’s darkest era.
Former French education minister Jack Lang took to X to offer a touching tribute, reflecting on Breytenbach’s influence and impact.
“A rebel with a tender heart, he was part of all the struggles for human rights,” he wrote.
Born in the Western Cape on 16 September 1939, to a family of five, Breytenbach lived much of his life abroad, but always remained true to his South African roots.
He attended the University of Cape Town and joined a group of Afrikaans poets and writers called the Sestigers, who wanted to highlight the beauty of the language while critiquing the racist apartheid regime.
Afrikaans evolved among white settlers and comes from the Dutch word for African.
With Afrikaners in power during apartheid, the language became ever more associated with the oppressive regime.
In an interview with The New York Times, he said: “I’d never reject Afrikaans as a language, but I reject it as part of the Afrikaner political identity. I no longer consider myself an Afrikaner.”
In 1960 he left South Africa for a self-imposed exile, mostly in Europe, but he continued to be a vocal critic of the apartheid regime.
He worked in London for a while before settling in France, where he met his Vietnamese wife Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien.
Breytenbach tried to return to South Africa with his wife in the 1960s, but she was denied a visa because she was a “non-white”. Interracial marriages were against the law.
In 1975, at the height of his literary fame, he made a clandestine return to South Africa, where he was arrested for attempting to aid resistance groups in the country.
He was sentenced to seven years in prison for terrorism, but continued to write poetry while he was jailed.
The then French President, François Mitterrand, helped secure his release in 1982 and he became a French citizen.
The years of imprisonment resulted in one of his most impactful works, his novel The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist – a harrowing account of his seven-year prison sentence, two of which he spent in solitary confinement.
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After apartheid ended, he became a vocal critic of the liberation government of Nelson Mandela. He felt the African National Congress (ANC) had turned into a “corrupt organisation”.
By weaving powerful narratives through his poetry, the writer not only confronted the entrenched inequities of South African society but also lent his voice to global struggles, crafting verses that called attention to the shared human fight for freedom and justice.
In 2002, he chose The Guardian as the platform to publish an open letter aimed at Ariel Sharon, who was Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, making a bold statement on the international stage.
“Why should we look the other way when it is Israel committing crimes? A viable state cannot be built on the expulsion of another people who have as much claim to that territory as you have,” he wrote about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
With a catalog of over 50 books to his name, Breytenbach achieved international acclaim as many of his works were translated into a wide array of languages, broadening their appeal worldwide.
Breytenbach was equally celebrated for his surreal paintings, characterized by haunting imagery of humans and animals confined within cages or other forms of captivity, reflecting themes of constraint and struggle.
