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 November 24, the New York Times reported. He was 85.
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"To be an Afrikaner is a political definition," he wrote in 1985. "It is a blight and a provocation to humanity."
When he was 20, Breytenbach traveled to Paris and studied painting. In 1962, he married Hoang Lien Ngo, who was from Vietnam, "but because of South Africa's laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, she was refused entry to the country," the Times noted. They settled in Paris and he eventually became a French citizen.
Breytenbach wrote poetry in Afrikaans and prose in English. He published his first volume of poetry, The Iron Cow Must Sweat, in 1964. His best-known work, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985), focused on the seven years he spent in prison in South Africa from 1975 to 1982 after traveling to South Africa and being charged with terrorism.
His other memoirs include A Season in Paradise (1973), Return to Paradise (1991), and Dog Heart: A Memoir (1999). The Times noted that "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."
Breytenbach was also a painter. His works have been exhibited in Paris, New York, and South Africa, when apartheid was ending.