Breyten Breytenbach

Breyten Breytenbach (Afrikaans pronunciation: [ˈbrəitən ˈbrəitənbaχ]; 16 September 1939 – 24 November 2024) was a South African writer, poet, and painter. He became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party–led South African Government. He was also known as a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement, and was one of the most important poets in Afrikaans literature.

Breyten Breytenbach was born on 16 September 1939 in Bonnievale, South Africa.

For secondary education, he attended Hoërskool Hugenote, in Wellington, Western Cape. He later attended the University of Cape Town, studying fine arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Art as well as philology.

Breytenbach was a political dissenter against the ruling National Party and its white supremacist policy of apartheid in the early 1960s. He was a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement of Afrikaner writers, in 1961, and participated in protests against the exclusion of black youth from educational pathways.

He left South Africa and lived in Europe and London for some time. In Paris, France, he married a French woman of Vietnamese ancestry, Yolande, as a result of which he was not allowed to return. The then applicable Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and Immorality Act (1950) made it a criminal offence for a person to have any sexual relations with a person of a different race. However, in 1973, a special visa was granted to the couple to allow them to travel to South Africa for a writers' congress at the University of Cape Town.

Breytenbach was involved in the anti-apartheid movement throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, and joined the international organisation Okhela (meaning "spark"). He spoke out against the policy of apartheid at writers' forums and United Nations conferences.

After travelling to South Africa in 1975 on a false passport with the intention of helping black Africans organise trade unions, and to recruit members of Okhela, Breytenbach was arrested. At his trial at the Supreme Court in Pretoria after being charged under the Terrorism Act 1967, he pleaded guilty to entering South Africa to start a branch of Okhela, which was intended to be a branch of the African National Congress (ANC) for white people. He was sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for high treason, the first two in solitary confinement. According to André Brink, Breytenbach was retried in June 1977 on new and fanciful charges that, among other things, he had planned a submarine attack by the Soviet Navy on the Robben Island prison through the Okhela. In the end, the judge found Breytenbach guilty only of having smuggled letters and poems out of jail, for which he was fined $50. He was not physically assaulted, but the prison officials abused him verbally, taunted him by pointing out the censorship of letters from his mother, and allowed him no privacy to mourn her death. While in prison, he wrote Mouroir: Mirror Notes of a Novel (published after his release, in 1983). He revisited his prison experiences in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984), in which neither the narrator nor his confessor are given stable identities.

He served seven years and was released in December 1982 as a result of international protests and the intervention of the French president François Mitterrand. Breytenbach returned to Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life, after obtaining French citizenship.