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.
In December 1993, he visited the "new South Africa", and continued to travel there regularly, as well as spending time in the United States and Europe. He continued to be "a critical observer and commentator on South African political and social issues". He became a vocal critic of Nelson Mandela's government, and said that the ANC had turned into a "corrupt organisation".
After free elections toppled the ruling National Party and ended apartheid in 1994, Breytenbach became a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town in the Graduate School of Humanities in January 2000.
He was a founding member and served as executive director of the Gorée Institute in Dakar, Senegal. This arose from an historic meeting in 1987 that became known as the Dakar Conference, between exiled leaders of the ANC and a group of liberal South Africans, mostly Afrikaners, from all walks of life. This gathering, held to define a strategy for effective struggle against the apartheid regime, was one of many that opened the way for a negotiated end to apartheid in South Africa. A good friend of Breytenbach, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, also attended. Breytenbach later taught classes at the institute.
He also campaigned against other injustices in the world. He wrote an open letter in The Guardian to Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, in 2002, saying that Israel was committing crimes against the Palestinians, and "A viable state cannot be built on the expulsion of another people who have as much claim to that territory as you have".
Breytenbach wrote poetry, novels, plays, and essays, mostly in Afrikaans. Many of his works have been translated into multiple languages.
His first published work was Die Ysterkoei Moet Sweet ("The Iron Cow Must Sweat") in 1964. It was regarded as groundbreaking in Afrikaans poetry, presenting "powerful and startling ideas ... without the use of traditional rhythmic metres and attractive images".
While in Paris, Breytenbach wrote several works about his experience as an immigrant. His work was at the time controversial in South Africa. His book Skryt. Om 'n sinkende skip blou te verf (Scrit. Painting Blue a Sinking Ship), published in the Netherlands in 1972, was dedicated "to the people of South Africa, denied citizenship in their own country". The book was banned from sale in South Africa.
During his imprisonment, Breytenbach wrote five volumes of poetry and English prose. His prison writings included the poem "Ballade van ontroue bemindes" ("Ballade of Unfaithful Lovers"). Inspired by François Villon's 15th-century "Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis", Breytenbach compared Afrikaner dissidents Peter Blum, Ingrid Jonker, and himself to unfaithful lovers, who had betrayed Afrikaans poetry by taking leave of it.
In 1984, he published The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.
Breytenbach was also known for his paintings, which have been exhibited internationally in Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, Stockholm, and Hong Kong. The works are often surreal in nature, featuring animal and human figures in captivity. He was inspired by Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch.