NEWS FLASH | EBOOK

ANDR PHILIPPUS BRINK

1935-2015
INTERVIEWS, NOTES AND TESTIMONIALS
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Published by Times Media Books 2014

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Photographs by RUSSELL ROBERTS, ROBERT BOTHA,
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CHRISTIANS

Contents
Photographs
Obituary: Andr Brink: Literary Giant, Social Activist and Teacher
Sunday Times on 8 February 2015
Sestigers and Censorship
Andr Brink at 70
Andr Brink in the news
RIP Andr Brink

Photographs

Obituary
ANDR BRINK: LITERARY GIANT, SOCIAL ACTIVIST AND TEACHER
Sunday Times 8 February 2015
Andr Philippus Brink, the celebrated novelist, academic and critic of apartheid, died on Friday on a flight
back to South Africa from Belgium, where he had received an honorary doctorate. He was 79.
The author of more than 20 works of fiction, nearly all published in both English and Afrikaans, and many
translated widely, Brink was born in Vrede, in the then Orange Free State, in 1935.
After a seminal period in Paris in his 20s, he rose through the ranks of world literature, often approaching
but never quite achieving its summit. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize twice, and his name was
regularly mentioned in conjunction with the Nobel prize for literature. Both accolades ultimately remained
beyond reach.
Noted nearly as much for his work as a teacher and literary critic, Brink held the position of emeritus professor
of English at the University of Cape Town, where he served as a mentor to several generations of writers,
including international bestselling author Lauren Beukes.
I found him incredibly generous, a good listener, and with interesting ideas about character, said Beukes,
who wrote her first novel, Moxyland, under his tutelage.

He told me I should know my characters down to the last detail, down to the kind of birth they had. It was
good advice.
Brinks own birth was relatively inauspicious: Vrede in 1935 was a classic South African dorp, as he wrote in his
2009 memoir, A Fork in the Road: It was a town of wide dusty streets, the pavements overgrown with thorns
(which we called, with good reason, duwweltjies, little devils) in a predicable grid around the tall spire of the
Dutch Reformed Church.
He matriculated in 1952 in Lydenburg, in the then Transvaal, and attended Potchefstroom University, where
he received degrees in English, Afrikaans and Dutch literature.
From Potchefstroom, one might have expected Brink to subside into a distinguished but uneventful career in
the prosaic territory of South African letters. But the Western world was on the cusp of the convulsions of
the 60s and Brink, who had secured a place at the Sorbonne in Paris, was pulled into them. He went twice to
France that decade, returning home the first time to help found one of South Africas most important literary
movements, and a second time to challenge the apartheid state with his art.
Stephen Johnson, one of Brinks publishers and former CEO of both Random House and Penguin Books, is a
member of Brinks literary trust. In Paris, said Johnson, Brink had first-hand exposure to the Existentialists,
and an artistic ferment that helped him establish what was, in truth, an entirely new direction in Afrikaans
fiction. When he came back to South Africa, he turned Afrikaans writing on its head. He experimented with
form, wrote about sex, changed the literature forever.
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I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960, Brink wrote of his
first visit to France. In South Africa, this rebirth translated into the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement
that Brink founded with the Afrikaans poet and littrateur Breyten Breytenbach. Other notable writers in the
movement, which brought modernity to Afrikaans writing and whipped the conservative Afrikaans mainstream
into frenzies of outrage, included Etienne Leroux, Adam Small, Elsa Joubert and, most significantly of all for
Brink, the poet Ingrid Jonker.
When Brink met Jonker, he was married to his first wife the first of five Estelle Naude, with whom he
had a son. He describes the moment vividly in A Fork in the Road: It was in the late afternoon of a blue and
golden late summers day, Thursday 18 April, 1963, that Ingrid walked into my ordered existence and turned
it upside down.
Brink and Jonker had an affair, and were involved in a love triangle with the novelist Jack Cope, who had
founded the South African literary magazine Contrast. Jonker fell pregnant and was forced to have an abortion,
which was illegal in South Africa at the time.
Her suicide in 1965 left Brink and the Sestigers bereft. The scene at the funeral, Brink wrote, was surreal: Jack
Cope tried to jump into the grave like a latter-day Laertes, and everything threatened to implode in low drama.
What strikes me when I look at it today is the realisation that almost everyone in that photo, in fact, everyone
involved with Ingrid in one way or another, is now dead.
Brink returned to Paris in 1967, and witnessed the waves of unrest, general strikes and riots that besieged
France in the summer of 1968. The period ushered him from literary radicalism to final political awakening:
when he returned to South Africa, he would catapult from notoriety in Afrikaans circles to genuine literary
fame around the world.
It began with the publication, in 1974, of his novel Kennis van die Aand, the first Afrikaans work of fiction
banned by the Nationalist government.
I fell in love with his writing through that novel, said Johnson. And its banning is what provoked him
subsequently to write each new novel simultaneously in English and Afrikaans. Kennis van die aand tells the
story of a mixed-race love affair. After its banning, it was published abroad, to wide acclaim, as Looking on
Darkness. It was the novel that launched Brinks international career.
This career burnt white-hot and perhaps too brightly to be sustained beyond a decade. Brink was shortlisted
for the Man Booker in rapid succession, for An Instant in the Wind (1976) and Rumours of Rain (1977), then
achieved the summit of his fame with the publication in 1979 of A Dry White Season a book that shot
around the world like a bullet, and was made into a film starring Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland and
Susan Sarandon.
Tracking the transformation of a complacent white South African into a politically aware crusader against
apartheid, the novel remains perennially in print, and is synonymous with Brinks name. I read A Dry White
Season in high school, in 1991, said Beukes. That was when I realised how evil and diabolical the state was.
Brink published prolifically in the decades after A Dry White Season, but never again to such worldwide
recognition. Outside South Africa he was lionised, especially in France, which laid almost equal claim to him
as a writer. He was twice awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government, its highest decoration.
In South Africa, he won the CNA Literary Award twice, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the M-Net Literary
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Award and the University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing.

In 2006, he received the Order of Ikhamanga in silver from the government, for his excellent contribution to
literature and fighting for a just and democratic society.
Hes one of our literary heroes, said Eloise Wessels, CEO of NB Publishers, whose imprint Human &
Rousseau published Brink from the beginning. One of the greatest Afrikaans authors and indeed one of the
worlds great authors and it feels like the end of an era.
Shortly before he died, Brink travelled to Belgium to receive an honorary doctorate. The full ceremony,
including his acceptance speech, was posted to YouTube. His final speech, in French, moved me deeply, said
Wessels. What he said about constantly looking for answers, and moving into the shadows to find them, and
not knowing whether they were there, is really the way he lived his life. Brink was in a wheelchair in Belgium,
having suffered from back pain and general frailty.
In 2005, at his 70th birthday celebration at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, the Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog
read a tribute, concluding: Andr P Brink speaks Afrikaans, English, French, Spanish, Dutch and German.
But the language he speaks best is attentive grace. They dont make men like that any more in the world.
Similar tributes emphasising Brinks humanity have poured in since his death.
He was that rare thing, a happy writer, said the novelist Imraan Coovadia, a colleague of Brinks at UCT.
He loved being a writer, but he could be it and also be a human being at the same time. He could be a father,
a husband, and a citizen and, to his credit, an unhappy citizen at that. He took his citizenship seriously. He
was also a brilliant critic his reading of Don Quixote was large, humane, original.
A great tree has fallen, said author Sindiwe Magona, from Atlanta, US.
He was a very good friend, a lifelong friend. When I started writing, immediately he was there for me. He was
such a gentle, nurturing guide for other writers.
Author Njabulo Ndebele said: Andr Brink was a person for whom I had the greatest respect. Both for his
intellect and his outstanding work as a novelist and also for his independent and courageous stand on many
issues that have challenged South Africa, both during apartheid and afterwards.
One of the lasting impacts he made on me was an article he wrote on the 1995 Rugby World Cup. I attended
a game of rugby for the first time in my life during that cup, and Brinks article helped show me its essence.
A tall man with a rugged build Brink played lock in amateur rugby matches he leaves four children,
Anton, Gustav, Danie and Sonja.
The last years of his life saw something of a second rebirth for Brink, sparked by his final marriage, to Polish
Karina Szczurek.
As she wrote in the Festschrift that she arranged for her husband in 2010, Encounters with Andr Brink,
even if we work in our separate studies, each is aware of the others presence across the passage ... I love the
fearlessness with which he encounters every windmill in his path and the eagerness with which he approaches
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every new adventure.

In A Fork in the Road, Brink wrote a letter to Szczurek that thanked her for bringing a roundness and a
happiness and a meaning to his life. He published more than a half a dozen works of fiction since 2000.
Brink remained actively engaged in public affairs, standing publicly against the secrecy bill, and campaigning
against violence after the murder of his nephew in 2008.
Brinks speech in Belgium touched on the motivations that drove him as a writer, and may be considered his
last public utterances: This is what matters: to say no in the face of the certitudes of power. Ben Williams

Sestigers and Censorship

Sunday Times, 13 April 1975

The controversial Afrikaans writer, Andr Brink, and his publisher, Mr Daantjie Saayman, have set up a special anti-censorship
fund to fight the effects of new censorship laws on Afrikaans literature and to ensure the publication if necessary in underground form of work which may be banned.

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Sunday Times, 4 January 1970

2/10/2015

Article - Untitled Article

Publication:Sunday Times;Date:Jan 4, 1970;Section:None;Page:10

Young, avant-garde Afrikaans writers who belong to the group

known as the Sestigers celebrated the end of the 1960s at a New
Years Eve party in Cape Town this weekend.

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Sunday Times, 25 April 1971

Andr Brink, the outspoken Sestiger writer: The premise

of censorship is that a small group of people have the right
to decide what an entire community may read, and see, and
eventually think. It is the right hand of any absolutist regime
and the refuge of small desperate minds.

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Andr Brink at 70

GOING STRONG
Sunday Times 19 June 2005
As we celebrate his 70th birthday, local literary legend Andr Brink tells Bongani Madondo in an interview
that he has no intention of slowing down
Is looking back especially on ones achievements, struggles and triumphs a concealed way of giving into self-indulgence and
nostalgia?
It could be. But for me this urge, to be valid, has more to do with the need to move towards the endless
discovery of meaning.
So where do we draw the line between self-serving nostalgia and artists role in creating work that is regarded as part of an artistic
heritage?
The important thing is, again, honesty. Which means that one doesnt try simply to serve the self or think
of high-falutin things like an artistic heritage, but to try and be truthful to what one has seen, or lived, or
dreamed, or hoped.
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Im not really sure how one is supposed to look at your age, but when I saw you earlier this year you did not look it how does
it feel to be 70?
I dreaded the very idea for a long time, but now I think that in many ways it is just a new and exciting beginning.
It is not that one starts finding answers to all the questions of your life, but at least you learn to formulate the
questions in more meaningful ways. And all the curiosity that has stimulated me throughout my life is still there
perhaps even more exhilaratingly than before.
It is more than 10 years since the dawn of democracy in this country. What are the challenges facing writers these days?
Essentially, the challenge remains the same: to write well. That means not allowing the world outside to dictate
what you should write but to remain true to the inner promptings of your mind and your conscience.
In an essay published in the New York Times, author Zakes Mda wrote that South Africa today was characterised by a culture of
greed, instant gratification and self-enrichment. What do you think defines South Africas soul at present?
Not an easy question! But I do think that, however valid Zakess statement is in many ways, it is also too
one-sided and negative. To me, our soul, whatever that may be, is also defined by the exciting awareness
wholly obvious in many respects, yet also new in a profound way that we find ourselves in Africa. This
sense of place, and of belonging, is the starting point of any definition of identity. And the mere fact of
acknowledging it means also the assumption of responsibility. Which takes one way beyond things like greed
or guilt or whatever.
Do you think South African society places unrealistic pressure on writers to offer answers and to chart the countrys future direction?
No. If anything, writers are left to their own devices much more than before. Which means that we are cut
down to size. And that is very healthy: we need no longer be defined by the cause(s) we promote, but simply
by the quality of our writing. And anyway, writers have never been good at giving answers: if they learn to put
the right questions, and occasionally to diagnose an illness correctly, that is about as much as one can hope for.
You have had a vast body of work published. Do you intend to produce more?
Im a writer! Which means that I cannot think of myself, or of the world, without writing. So I hope to continue
for as long as I have a moving finger.
What do you think have been your greatest achievements and failures literary and commercial?
That, I really believe, is for others to judge.
Do you ever dream, or are you open to the possibility of, being optioned or commissioned by Hollywood again (A Dry White Season,
filmed in 1989)?
Commissioned, never. But I have a great respect for film as medium if it is approached correctly, artistically,
and not in the first place, commercially. So I do hope there will be further opportunities (there are a few in the
pipeline); but I have more faith in European or African ventures than in American ones.
Do you think literature assumes a new and different power and meaning once interpreted in another medium, such as film?

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Obviously. Which means that I cannot part with film rights unless I am confident that the filmmaker is totally
dedicated to and passionate about her or his medium.
In Living to Tell the Tale, the Latin-American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez recounts a large part of his personal and professional
life. Does age push artists to look back?
As one grows older, the urge to look
Should writers be concerned about leaving a legacy?
No. What matters is the intensity of the writing. If that is worthy, the legacy and the future can take
care of itself.
Not so long ago I asked you about the art scam connected to Nelson Mandela. You said that you found what was happening to him
quite unfortunate and in bad taste. I took it to mean that you thought that some people were tampering with a very significant
symbol; a legacy.
The reference was, I think, to the misuse of his artwork, and his name, by others. Which is an insult to one of
the greatest human beings of our time. Precisely because he himself is so humble, so honest, so committed to
the causes which are ultimately the key to human redemption freedom, justice, truth.
In an essay you wrote on Mandelas significance published in the Mail & Guardian several years ago, you likened the man to a
great tiger, a political visionary and a powerful symbol of racial reconciliation. How do you think artists, writers and commentators
will view his legacy 10 years from now?
No one can foretell what the image will be 10 years from now; or what we should think. I believe that
Mandelas meaning resides precisely in the fact that every new generation will find its own appreciation of
him.
Still on the question of legacy and meaning, you were regarded as a member of Die Sestigers, a group of progressive Afrikaans
authors that included Breyten Breytenbach and the late Etienne le Roux and Jan Rabie. How have you evolved since then?
I think, or hope, that I have broadened my scope in immersing myself in issues beyond the immediacies of
the 1960s; exploring, for example, not just racism but also other forms of oppression in our society like the
oppression of women or of minorities.
Why, after more than 40 years, are you now opening yourself up to popular media?
Ive always written more popular stuff as well, in Afrikaans! Basically, I am interested in so many different
kinds of things that I cannot refrain from trying out new possibilities.
Also, in our time the distinctions between high and low cultures have crumbled. But I suppose that very
different languages and then follow wherever they may lead.
Do you believe that through the process of writing, editing, the translator becomes a very important player in the resultant work? An
author of someone elses book, so to speak?
I fully agree with this. Which also brings with it an enormous but above all, challenging and enjoyable
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sense of responsibility.
What are your views on the Americanisation of South African youth and popular culture?
I view this with great misgivings and suspicion, especially as the concept of America has become so terrifyingly
tainted in the Bush era.
And of marriage as an institution? You yourself have been married six times, right?
Outdated. But still useful.
What do you think of the tabloidisation of the media?
Sickening.
And of the cry, Where are the voices of new black authors?
There have been quite a number (of black voices) in the last few years, and I know of still more preparing to
break into print. My belief is that, for both black and white writers, we are on the edge of a veritable explosion
of new creativity.
Do you believe Afrikaners can maintain a solid unity without becoming laagered? Do you think Afrikaners deserve special status or
political treatment?
No, they have never been homogeneous, although apartheid for some time created a highly artificial image of
just that. And they certainly do not need any special consideration or treatment. But nor do they deserve to
be thrown out with the garbage of apartheid. Their language, shaped in the mouths of the oppressed and the
deprived, slaves and indigenous peoples, gave a new voice to the African experience.
Are they under siege? And by who?
Some of them believe this, mainly because they feel their erstwhile privileges threatened. And some dignitaries
within the ANC have not done much to dispel this perception. But if they a re besieged, it is more by their own
mentality than by any external reality.
What about other minorities ?
South Africa at the moment does not really care enough about any minority, whether it is Coloured people,
gays, or whatever. There has been a sad betrayal of many of the foundation stones of our Constitution and of
the struggle for liberation.
Beyond big ideas and plots, how do you relax? What, besides writing or reading, offers you the greatest joy?
Music. Or watching rugby. Although this past year has been dismal.
What are your plans for this phase of your life?
To continue as before just more joyously .
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A week after the interview, Brink sent the following e-mail:

Dear Bongani: I thought of another reply to your question about my thoughts on marriage. I believe I could
think of marriage the way I feel about The Da Vinci Code. The writing is awful, yet I couldnt put the book
down. Which is another way of saying what Dylan Thomas said about life: Isnt life a terrible thing, thank
God?
deep down my preoccupations have always been serious: human loneliness, our awareness of and interaction
with the Other, the explorations of identity . . .
In just one year you will have appeared on 7de Laan, Hard Copy and Madam & Eve all popular TV soapies and sitcoms.
Are you launching yourself afresh?
No, Im just enjoying myself more.
What does your involvement with this powerful mass communication tool mean to your legacy, and how do you view the literary
establishments perception of it?
I really dont know (or care?). Life is there to be lived, and in one way or another (and this is another!) it
seems more worthwhile to enjoy what one is doing than just allowing time to pass.
It is said that you do your own translations, or rather, that you write each book twice once in Afrikaans and once in English.
How do you negotiate the peculiarities and differences of these two languages?
Yes, I do write each book twice. And I take each version through anything from five to 15 rewritings. And I
dont waste too much time on thinking about what is happening: I simply try to listen as acutely as possible to
the different promptings of two. Bongani Madondo

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A LIFETIME OF STORYTELLING
Sunday Times 5 June 2005
IN ANDR Brinks novel Devils Valley, the main character gains the following insight after he had listened to
many stories:
With the lies of stories all the lies, all the stories we shape ourselves the way the first person was
shaped from the dust of the Earth. That is our first and ultimate dust. Who knows, if we understood what
was happening to us, we might not have needed stories in the first place. We fabricate yesterdays for ourselves
which we can live with, which make the future possible.
In more than 20 novels Brink has distinguished himself as a master storyteller who fully realises that stories
are lies, but also as one who knows that we have no other way of understanding ourselves and the world. We
need stories to understand what is happening to us; stories that help us to deal with the past in order to make
a different future possible.
Acclaimed author Andr Brink turned 70 last week. Willie Burger celebrates the career of a man who has for
four decades told the stories that help us make sense of our lives; and SA writers pay tribute
In 1974 Brinks Kennis van die Aand was the first Afrikaans novel to be banned by the National Party
government. This incident had a profound influence on his career. Cut off from his readers and in order to
find a new (overseas) audience, he rewrote the book in English (it was published as Looking On Darkness).
Ever since then he has written his novels in both English and Afrikaans so that he could be guaranteed an
audience even if the Afrikaans version was banned. He continued to do this even after the fear of censorship
abated, claiming that more opportunities open up to him when he is forced to work with two different ways of
looking at the world.
Brink became one of South Africas best-known writers and his works have been translated into over 30
languages. His fierce opposition to apartheid led to the realisation that a writer in this country could not only
be experimenting with narrative modes and be concerned with the aesthetic aspects of writing.
With Looking On Darkness and the novels that followed in the 1970s and 1980s A Dry White Season, An
Instant in the Wind, Rumours of Rain, An Act of Terror Brink wrote about the political situation of the
day.
Very often such political novels fail the test of time, but it is interesting to reread Brinks struggle novels
now, decades later. Like the best engaged literature, they have not lost any of their punch and flavour. There
are at least two reasons for this.
Firstly, Brink is a master storyteller. These stories and the fate of their characters are still compelling. Secondly,
his work was not merely about opposing apartheid. Engaged literature does not contain only political slogans
or lists of atrocities under the guise of fiction. If that was the case, these novels would be unbearable to read
now.
Brink wrote against the forces behind apartheid the inhumane systems and actions that seem to always
be with us while not compromising his aesthetic ideals. His novels thus have the power to encourage even
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contemporary readers to take up a position against repression of any kind. They show it is still important to
imagine the possibility of a different future.
Although his 1970s and 1980s novels contributed to Brinks international stature, those that he wrote in
Afrikaans in the 1960s helped foment a major shift in Afrikaans fiction.
As a leading figure of the Sestigers as the writers associated with the journal Sestiger became known Brink
played a key role in the renewal of the Afrikaans literary landscape. Reacting strongly against conventional
Afrikaans novels characterised by a genial, local realism, he set out to experiment with different techniques.
Brink and writers such as Etienne le Roux not only applied new forms to Afrikaans fiction, but also set out to
challenge the dominant ideas of Afrikaner society. Novels such as Die Ambassadeur, Lobola vir die Lewe and
Orgie were strongly influenced by the existentialist theories of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Not everyone welcomed the cultural upheaval set off by the Sestigers. Dr Koot Vorster, moderator of the
Dutch Reformed Church and brother of then-prime minister John Vorster, referred to Brink and the Sestigers
as vuilspuite (filth injectors) because of their frankness in writing about the sexual.
Even though many of the Sestigers works were regarded as volksvreem d (alien to the volk) by the literary es
- tablishment, they changed the face of Afrikaans literature forever and Brinks novels and literary criticism
played a major role in this.
Unsurprisingly, none of Brinks Afrikaans novels from this period won any major literary awards. He has,
however, received the CNA Prize for English fiction, was runner-up for the Booker Prize on two occasions and
won several European literary awards.
The majority of Brinks novels rely on historical research and are often set in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries.
A Chain of Voices, for example, was based on research Brink had done about a 1825 slave revolt. On the
Contrary is based on the well-documented case of Estienne Barbier who lived a life of resistance against the
Cape government in Dutch colonial times.
Brink acknowledges that he has always been interested in history, the result of a Standard Seven teacher who
encouraged him to read different works relating to the same history.
His latest novel, Praying Mantis, is also set against a historical backdrop. As in all his other novels, however, it
also serves as more than mere background: history itself is examined; the ways in which the past is narrated is
explored.
As in An Instant in the Wind (1975), On the Contrary (1993), and The Other Side of Silence (2002), the basis
for Praying Mantis is a long journey through a desolate landscape. These geographical journeys also become
spiritual and sexual journeys through the uncharted terrain. Its Brink at the height of his storytelling
powers.
His novels since the 1980s have been described as a third phase, after the existentialist, experimental phase
of the 1960s and the politically engaged phase of the 1970s and 1980s. It is true that his later novels emphasise
a postmodernist self-consciousness and are often marked by a kind of magical realism.
As in the works of the Latin American magical realists, Brinks use of this technique is tied up with history.
19

It makes it possible to examine the influence of the past by giving it strong resonance in the present, or by
creating alternative histories.
Although some critics say he copied his use of magical realism from writers like Gabriel Garcia Mrquez,
Brink created a specific South African style by drawing on traditional Khoi myths and the rich oral traditions
of indigenous languages.
Storytelling remains central to Brinks work. His characters are often obsessed with narrating their stories;
their personal and family histories. For Brink, telling stories is the main way in which we make sense of the
world; the way in which we create ourselves. He tells stories that heal, that help us to understand, that make it
possible to see the world in a different light to see how things are wrong, but also to see how wrongs can be
righted. Willie Burger

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TESTIMONIALS: WRITERS ON BRINK

Sunday Times 5 June 2005
DIANE AWERBUCK: THERE is a certain carpenters guild still
operating in Germany. You will find these men in the furthest reaches of
the Earth, banned within a 100km radius from the towns of their birth.
For two years they must earn their keep with the work of their hands
before they can return and set themselves up as carpenters.
Completing a masters degree in creative writing is not unlike this process:
youre exiled in your imagination, forced to scour strange places for the
information that will allow you to measure and join, plane and saw, until
the thing you are building rises up, tangy with the smell of sawdust.
Professor Andr Brink is a master craftsman. There are apprentices who
come to his workshop to learn what they think is a trade. They leave with
an idea of how to be a person who writes rather than a writer. You might
say Brink is handy with a spirit level. Happy birthday, old man, from a
girl with a hammer. May your highway through the flowers lead to the
log cabin in the woods.
PATRICIA SCHONSTEIN: IN CELEBRATING Andr Brinks
70th birthday, one naturally compliments him on his considerable and
extraordinary contribution to South African literature.
It goes without saying that he has enriched the lives of many readers,
both here and internationally, with his skill, his sharp creativity, his
craftsmanship, his tenderness and his wit.
But one must consider, too, his generosity as a teacher and mentor.
He has nurtured some amazing young talent and facilitated the
emergence of strong, new novelists whose work is easily comparable to
that of mature and established writers. I admire him for this.
The gift I would bring to his party is a set of quills and an ever-refilling
well of black ink that he may keep on writing and delivering worthy
manuscripts.
CHRISTOPHER HOPE: IT WAS in 1974 in Cape Town, during
what became a legendary get-together of poets from Uys Krige to
Mongane Wally Serote, James Matthews and Douglas Livingstone
that we heard of the banning of Andr Brinks latest novel, Kennis
van die Aand (Looking On Darkness). Several felt we should protest;
I suggested wed do better to send him our congratulations. Writing in
Afrikaans had stepped into the world.

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Brink had been looking for trouble ever since he published his Parisian novel
The Ambassador back in the 1960s. What a relief it was to have writers
that were unparochial and unafraid, open to fresh air and foreign ideas.
Brinks rebellion flew in the face of his tribe and the cultural commissars
who ran, and ruined, the arts boring bigots who put party and race
ahead of everything else; who concocted an ideology of division and
distrust and called it unity; who regarded dissenting voices as unpatriotic
and un-South African. Brink wrote himself free of that trap and for
that I salute him.
MAX DU PREEZ: I READ Andr Brinks Die Ambassadeur when I was
a Kroonstad schoolboy of 16. I had never read anything like it, certainly
not in Afrikaans. I didnt really understand it, but I understood enough to
know I had to read more books by this man. When one of my teachers
caught me reading Lobola vir die Lewe, he warned me against anarchists
like Brink. Now this is interesting, I thought. When he added, To think
that he was born of a good Free State Afrikaner family, I knew Brink was
going to play a part in my life. And he did.
Brink reassured me that a Vrystaatse boerseun could think for himself and
break out of the Afrikaner Calvinist/Nationalist laager; that ones body
and soul could be in Africa but ones mind could soar all over the planet.
During a time of political anger his books reminded me that Afrikaans
was much more than just the language of some of the evil men who spoke
it. When I got to know him during the Dakar Safari to the ANC in 1987,
I also learned that he was a generous and sensitive human being. Hes a
national treasure.
IVAN VLADISLAC: ANDR Brink has been part of my reading life
since my student days when I discovered those brave early books, Looking
on Darkness and An Instant in the Wi n d . He is one of the writers who
made it possible for me to think of myself as a South African, and later,
with more difficulty, as a South African novelist.
I cannot imagine our literary world without his passionate, principled
voice. In his work, he has held Afrikaans and English, Africa and Europe,
fiction and criticism in a unique imaginative balance.
And no one has written about their fellow writers with more insight or
supported them more generously (and I include myself in that lucky
company).
Andr, thank you and happy birthday. May you have many writing years
ahead of you.
RAYDA JACOBS: RECENTLY, when I spent a week in Durban at the International Writers Festival, where
Andr Brink was also a participant, I had the opportunity to meet him. I had read his earlier work and enjoyed
it. But I had never met him, and I had a question a Norwegian friend had asked me to ask. It was a question I
22

had been asked also, and was wondering whether his response would be the same as mine.
My chance came one morning after breakfast. You have written so many books, I said. Do you ever run out
of ideas? He looked at me and smiled. Oh, no. Never. I wont have enough time to write it all.
That same night, on stage, saying a few words to introduce himself, he told a funny story about how there had
been two Andr Brinks on the flight coming in, and how he never arrived, or how he arrived twice. I cant
remember exactly, but what I remember thinking at the time, listening to the audience laugh and enjoying the
tale, was that Brink was a true storyteller.
SANDILE DIKENI: ONE sad Sunday in August 1986, while an angry
southeaster blew its venom against the concrete walls of the Victor Verster
Maximum Security Prison, a tardy group of prisoners from the juvenile
section were being led from their cells into the jails library. It had been two
months since I had read anything apart from name tags.
I was ready to read anything. A quick browse through the shelves told me
that I was not going to encounter the complete works of Karl Marx. And
how I would have loved to have finished Das Kapital. I had time on my
hands, you see, lots of it, considering that the speculation in 1986 was that
the State of Emergency would last for 12 years, the same as in Ian Smiths
Rhodesia. Our guide must have been reading my mind, for he said: No
communist books here, as he led us through the librarys Afrikaans section.
But then, like an instant in the wind, I saw it: Brinks n Oomblik in die Wind. It was the only copy! I grabbed
it the way a hungry child takes a piece of bread from Bob Geldof.
Thats in Afrikaans, the guide told me. I grinned and told him I wanted to learn Afrikaans. You obviously
dont know Brink, I thought. Having read A Dry White Season some time earlier, I knew Brink was the next
best thing to Marx in a place like Victor Verster circa 1986. In fact, many of the inmates in South African jails
around that time could easily have pointed out Brink as one of the reasons they were inside.
I took the book back to my cell and began one of the greatest literary journeys in incarceration. I would often
be in danger of missing mealtimes as I travelled through the Karoo in the company of one of the most riveting
storytellers. And many times, as they announced the names of detainees about to be released, I wondered what
it would be like to go free before finishing the book.
When I was done I had a strange smile on my face and a crazy look in my eyes. Brink, you see, had assisted me
in what I call an act of sabotage. In Afrikaans, nogal!

23

Andr Brink in the news

AUTHORS STEINBERG AND BRINK WIN PATON AWARDS
Sunday Times 11 May 2005
WRITER Jonny Steinberg last night walked away with the 15th Alan Paton non-fiction award, winning
R50000 in cash for his book Midlands at a gala dinner organised by the Sunday Times to honour Southern
African writers.
Steinbergs book is a meticulous account of the politics surrounding the murder of a young white farmer in
KwaZulu-Natal.
I feel honoured and pleased its a wonderful award to win, said Steinberg.
The Alan Paton fiction award, also worth R50000, went to author Andr Brink for The Other Side of
Silence, an account of a young girl from an orphanage in Bremen who is sent to the then German South West
Africa as part of a shipment of women to be claimed by German men.
The prestigious Bessie Head award was won by Nokuthula Mazibuko for her proposed work Chaos a series
of portraits about three young people who formed military underground structures to fight apartheid in the
1980s. Mazibuko wins R100000 to spend six months researching and writing six feature stories, which will be
published in the Sunday Times.
This is a dream come true for me, said Mazibuko.
Thank you to the Sunday Times for ensuring that our stories are not lost and future generations have a wealth
of testimony from which to draw.
Commenting on the awards, Sunday Times editor Mathatha Tsedu said: The stories that won tonight are
stories about South Africa, its past, its present, and its future. And if there is a central message that the Sunday
Times wants to take forward with these awards, it is that South Africans have to record their own history. As a
newspaper we remain committed to supporting budding and established writers.
Brink, who is currently in Belgium, said: I am grateful to the Sunday Times for having acknowledged it [his
book] in this generous way. His award was received by Claire Grant, a representative from his publisher
Random House.
Guests attending the prestigious event included Education Minister Kader Asmal and retired politician Helen
Suzman.
Elinor Sisulu, daughter-in-law of late ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu, was a runner-up for the nonfiction prize for
her biography of Sisulu and his wife, Albertina. Gudrun Heckl

24

CRAFTY GERMAN CHEATS SA NOVELIST

Sunday Times 13 October 2002

AUTHOR Andr Brink has revealed how he was tricked by a German con artist into parting with a valuable
manuscript.
The respected writer, who has been publicising his 15th novel, The Other Side of Silence, at local bookshops,
disclosed to fans and colleagues at recent meetings how he was taken for a ride by the persuasive German, and
how he took his revenge.
The con man, a resident of the northern German city of Hanover, wrote Brink a letter saying that he was a
great admirer of the South African writer and wanted to make him his heir.
Flattery persuades Andr Brink to part with the manuscript of one of his books but the writer gets his
revenge in the end
Brink confessed to being flattered by such high regard, and the two men began exchanging letters. Their
correspondence became so familiar that the German felt emboldened to ask Brink a favour. Though ostensibly
nearing death, the man told Brink he wanted nothing so much as one of the authors original manuscripts.
In return, Brink had visions of inheriting a schloss on the Rhine and felt he would be ahead on the deal,
so he sent him one, according to one account of the scam, published in The Tatler, a weekly free newspaper
distributed in Cape Towns southern suburbs.
According to the report, Brink said he realised he had been a victim of a scam two months later when he was
alerted by his agent in Zurich, Switzerland, who also acted for a US author.
The Zurich agent noticed that the man with whom Brink had been corresponding and to whom he had sent
his precious manuscript was also the man to whom the US author had dedicated his latest novel.
With his shaky handwriting, the German had conned several authors into parting with their manuscripts, and
there was little they could do to get them back.

25

While Brink gave up notions of inheriting a Rhineland schloss, the American author wanted to expose the con
man on the Internet, but unfortunately died before he could do so. Brink, however, has outed the villain,
taking revenge in The Other Side of Silence, an account of Hanna X, a woman sent out from Germany to
cater for the needs of the farmers in the colony, South West Africa.
The books chief villain is Hauptmann (Colonel) Heinrich Bhlke a name borrowed from the artful owner
of one of Brinks manuscripts.
According to a review elsewhere in the Sunday Times this week, the book recalls Hanna Xs sexual brutalisation
and defacement at the fictional Bhlkes hands.
This week, Nicky Stubbs, Brinks publicist at publishers Human & Rousseau, confirmed the tale was accurate.
But, she said, Brink had said enough on the matter.
This is just an attempt to sensationalise the issue, sniffed Stubbs in response to requests for further details.
However, responding by e-mail through Etienne Bloemhof, his editor at Human & Rousseau, Brink confirmed
that the fictitious Bhlkes name was inspired by the con man from Hanover. He also said that the manuscript
that he had lost was for his novel On the Contrary.
There isnt really much to add, Boshoff said. Andr simply cannot recall what the Americans name was. If
anything further were to develop, hed gladly share that with all. Bonny Schoonakker

26

THE MAN WHO WOULDNT BE SILENCED

Weekend Post 6 August 2005

DEATH OF apartheid has liberated wordsmiths, says award-winning author Andr Brink
With his latest book now on the shelves, in a candid interview with Thabo Masemola he tells of his conservative
upbringing and the rejection of his first novel at age 14 for being too erotic
He once admired Napoleon Bonaparte but is today ashamed of it. Also Charles de Gaulle, which he also
thinks is appalling.
Author Andr Brink has confessed his erstwhile admiration for the two titans of French imperialism.
Brink , born in Vrede in the Free State in 1935, was brought up in a God-fearing and staunchly National Party
family who were firmly behind the policy of apartheid yet, when he was 14, he wrote a novel which publishers
rejected because it was too erotic.
He smiles. I didnt know what the word meant, but suppose it was a sign of things to come.
His father, a magistrate, was constantly being transferred, so he spent his childhood in various places.
His first poems, published when he was nine, were atrocious stuff which was published in a little newspaper
for children in 1944, Brink says.
27

He has twice been short-listed for Britains Booker Prize, won the CNA Award several times and the Sunday
Times Fiction Prize for his novel The Other Side of Silence.
He has been also been on the Nobel Prize for literature short-list more than once.
A professor in the University of Cape Towns English department for the past 15 years, Brink says that as a
youngster he wanted to be a train driver but knew that he would be a writer on the side, because I got such
satisfaction from the process of writing.
As the years went by, he discovered that you only live twice the first time is when you live through something
and then when you write about it.
But it is when I sit down and write about it that I realise what Ive learnt about the experience.
It is inevitable that a writers work comes from personal experience. But the most important thing is the
imagination, so that you yourself might find it difficult to find the connection with your life.
He speaks with sadness about having his book Kennis van die Aand (Looking on Darkness) banned in 1973.
Up to that point Brink wrote only in Afrikaans but from then onward embarked on a process where he wrote
simultaneously in English and Afrikaans.
Remarkably, as each work develops two distinct novels unfold, rather than an original plus translation.
I write in two languages and there are always differences in either nuances, sentences, paragraphs but
sometimes differences in episodes, depending on what each language can best express what Im writing.
Writing in Afrikaans which is a minor language in world terms, almost meant an end to his writing life.
But things changed once he switched to English and was published by publishers in Britain, enabling him to
be read widely around the world.
My book (Kennis van die Aand) allegedly endangered the security of the state, but that is ridiculous because
I was only talking about love between a coloured and a white. The persecution that followed made life difficult
for me and my family, especially for my kids and made me resolve not to shut up. Unlike most of my friends
who had to leave the country to survive, I think it was immensely important for some writers to remain on the
inside.
Describing his personal life, Brink says he has been divorced a few times and has four grown children and a
new companion. Before settling in Cape Town, he spent 30 years lecturing at Rhodes University. Although no
longer teaching, he continues to supervise a few theses.
His latest work is entitled Praying Mantis, described as a heady mixture of comedy and tragedy, the real and
the mystical that explores . . . the origins of racial tension in the shadowlands between myth and history, and
was launched in South Africa last month.
Brink denies that the end of apartheid led to a death of writing talent in South Africa. Instead, he insists that
it has liberated the writer. Since the change-over I feel free to write about anything. For me that has been an
28

immense blessing.
Rather than less, it has been enormously enriching because it has opened up opportunities to write about a lot
of other subjects. Always a voracious reader, he was driven to write by many influences. He singled out the
Sharpeville massacre in 1960 as the catalyst for his awareness. Studying in Paris at the time he was shocked
into seeing his homelands politics in a new way.
I was in Paris studying and suddenly seeing something terrible happen in my country from afar triggered
something in me. Never while I was here had I had the opportunity of seeing that there could be another way
of life.
When I grew up my parents were staunch supporters of the Nationalists and their policies.
And having studied at an Afrikaans university where everybody went to Amsterdam for further studies, Brink
did not want to go where everybody went, thus his choice of Paris. Poignantly, his sojourn there coincided with
the Algerian occupation (by France). Looking down the Champs Ellyses, it was lined with soldiers armed with
machine guns and this happened simultaneously with Sharpeville. Whatever I learnt in France, it made me
realise more that my roots are here in Africa.
Having 20 English language novels to his name, Brink thinks his next project could be a memoir. He believes
he still has few books in him as there are so many stories waiting to be told. If I live another 70 years there is
enough material to fill that space. At the moment I just need time to clear up (my mind) after the latest book.
Thabo Masemola

29

UNMASKING THE TRUTH BEHIND BRINK S FICTION

Weekend Review 4 April 2009
Memoirs confront reality of authors formative years.

THE first time I see Andr Brink, he is surrounded by naked women. To be accurate, they are nudes, in
frames on the walls around him. The two real women he is speaking to are both clothed. Still, it is surely no
coincidence that Brink , the 73-year-old South African novelist whose passion for words is rivaled only by his
passion for women should be hosted at an art gallery featuring an exhibition of The Great South African
Nude?
We are at the gallery for a meeting of a celebrity book club. I ask one of the wallflower-like PR women if it
is coincidence or deliberate that Brink s public discussion of his memoirs, A Fork in the Road, is taking place
against a backdrop of subtle and not-so-subtle female flesh.
The PR woman pales. Im sure its not deliberate, she stammers.
When I interview Brink the next day, I ask if he had any say in the choice of venue. He chuckles.
Not at all. I didnt have the foggiest idea what to expect.
Nevertheless, the gallery is a fitting venue. It no doubt makes sense to the gathered fans, as familiar with his
takes on sex as with his painfully adept story-telling that saw him censored for much of the 1970s and 1980s
in apartheid SA.
The fans get what they want. Brink , the twice Booker Prize short-listed author, gives a good performance. In
person he is underwhelmingly ordinary. He carries himself with a reticent awkwardness and speaks softly. But
he tells a good story. He describes the wine for the evening with relish. The person who started the wine farm
was a woman from Indonesia who was a murderer, he begins. He has a self-deprecating humour with welltimed quips. The audience laughs.

30

He gives a sober assessment of his post-apartheid reconciliation with his original Afrikaner culture.

One of the things that has most pleased me in recent years is the number of staunch Afrikaners that have
approached me and said outright: You were right. But one cannot underestimate the resentment which still
runs deep In some, not all, circles. The audience nods.
Brink is asked if he will write about his past relationships, which are largely ignored in this memoir. He says
No but describes his current, three-year-old marriage. I have the experience that (in his wife Karina) I have
finally come home. There I am stuck and I dont ever want to get out of that stuckness.
The audience sighs contentedly.
It is a good show. But Brink knows all about performances. In every performance, the sometime theatre
director writes in his memoir, two plays are being acted out: the public one and another in the mind of the
31

actor. So too, it must be, with his writing. I put it to him the next day: What inner play is working out in his
own mind with this memoir?
I think it was the attempt to go behind the masks which fiction inevitably wears to find out what things I had
experienced which resulted in the fiction What one writes is invariably prompted by something. And that
you then try to interpret that yourself in the guise of a story and that becomes the book . But I found it quite
fascinating to explore what the stories behind the masks were.
That is clear when it comes to violence. The violence that leaps out of Brink s writing has its provenance in
his upbringing in the rural Orange Free State. The memoir also forms an attempt to expiate Brink s own guilt
about such a culture of violence.
He writes of the day-long beating meted out to a teenage domestic worker by a family friend. As punishment
for running away from the farm, the boy was stripped and tied down in the coal shed, where he was beaten
with lengths of hosepipe from 10am until the evening by the farmer and two of his adult friends.
Brink , then a young man, did not try to stop the attack, but hid in his room.
Such sadistic brutality repeats in Brink s books, whether in the violence against Joseph Malan and his ancestors
in Looking on Darkness; in the violence perpetrated on and by the narrators sister in Imaginings of Sand or
the sadistic attack on Hanna X in The Other Side of Silence. As Brink explains, his early experiences did
colour his writing.
To a very large extent. To an alarming extent. Writing his memoir gave him the opportunity to directly
confront the forces that shaped him and his writing, he says. In one novel after another, I realised I was
grappling with those ghosts from my past.
Writing it was difficult.
I found this very harrowing. Even in the lighter moments of fun and relaxation, once I started to explore those
they led, in rather unexpected ways, to darker depths, darker ramifications of these issues I was tackling
But I felt obliged to pursue them for as far as possible to try and maintain the kind of honesty which I believe
a memoir requires of the writer. And that was not always easy.
Not easy indeed. But there is much humour. Brink writes of being duped in 2000 by one Herr Bhlke, who
wrote saying he was an elderly German with no heir. As he was a Brink fan, would the writer consent to be the
recipient of his estate? Brink readily agreed.
The man asked for an original manuscript. Brink sent it, picturing the eventual fortune, or castle on the Rhine
that would come his way. Nothing happened. But soon after, Brink heard of a fellow writer, an American,
whod been promised the mans entire estate. Herr Bhlke never surfaced again.
But when all else fails, writers do have one recourse: the last word, Brink concludes. He was writing The
Other Side of Silence at the time and named one figure the most despicable character I have ever created
Bhlke.
But there is something unsatisfactory about this explanation and the memoir he has penned.

32

The lack of assessment of his relationships which must have provided experiences for some his novels, is
one obvious omission. But even with the relationship he does go into some detail about with poet Ingrid
Jonker there is a sense of tying it up with a bow.
Jonker was a fellow Sestiger (one of a group of progressive Afrikaans writers in the 1960s who challenged
the apartheid state). After a two-year relationship with Brink (and others), she drowned herself in 1965 at 31.
Brink brings her vibrantly to life, 40 years after her death.
I saw her eyes move through an amazing range of expressions, from cool and detached to flashing with
ferocity And her sensitive, sensuous mouth: cynical, content, angry, vulnerable, playful, bitter, mocking,
tranquil, raging, happy, generous, wild.
Jonker ruined his marriage and changed his life forever when she walked into my ordered existence and
turned it upside down, he writes. And yet Brink ties up the chapter of this tumultuous time of fierce passion,
sex, mental illness (Jonkers) and rebellious, dangerous words with a twee, almost contrived, account of visiting
his wifes native Poland and meeting her uncle, whose publishing firm had translated Jonkers work into Polish.
It was the closing of a very special circle, he writes.
I put it to Brink that this feels like a spin job, designed to give an alls-well-that-ends-well finish.
Perhaps it was inevitable because I had finished that chapter and finished it by the time this incident happened.
So perhaps that was tagged on a bit unnecessarily and didnt quite work. But at the same time it seemed so
strange after everything that had happened in my life, so many years after Ingrids death, that this entirely
unexpected addendum to her life happened in a country so far from SA that I felt I had to put it in.
Brink s passion for women extends to writing as them. He does it well last year my mother-in-law, born in
the rural Western Cape, gave me Imaginings of Sand, saying it would give me a good insight into Afrikaans
women. I ask Brink how he made the transition from mainly male characters to female.
Perhaps because in my really early books there had been more and more voices of protest going up
saying all my women are always the same, they were just little noise and playthings for the men and will I
never grow up? So I think well, Id better start investigating this. And just at that moment the shift happened
in my relationships towards women with a stronger sense of personal identity. So from there on it was almost
inevitable.
The main character in The Other Side of Silence, a miserably violent story of women shipped out by colonial
German authorities in the late 19th century to populate what is now Namibia, is a woman called Hanna. I ask
if the tale of the violence she suffers is as an act of contrition on the part of men towards women collectively.
I think there was something of that in it, which may explain the way, the reason, for going to such extremes in
the depiction of what she went through, almost turning her into the individual carrying the collective atrocities
borne by women through the centuries in SA and perhaps in the world.
Yet where this memoir is unsatisfactory is in Brink s own failure to analyse the hurt he caused the women
through his infidelities. A reader loses count of the number of times he writes about leaving his wife or partner
for another woman, even though many of these were no doubt the ones who inspired his characters.

33

In a foreword to Imaginings of Sand, he explicitly thanks his then wife Marsa for her help in creating the
characters. At the same time the memoir contains doting dad-style indulgent paragraphs where he says how
proud he is of his children and twee references to his latest wife. No one would deny Brink a happy family life,
but such insertions make an anaemic contrast to the frank soul searching with which he confronts the violence
of his past.
Is he trying to deny the effect on his life of his previous wives and trying to compensate for that by bringing
children into it?
I can understand the validity of that observation, but it was certainly not for a moment intended like that, he
says gently but firmly. The reason for leaving out the wives was really as a matter of paying a kind of respect
to them I felt justified to leave out these parts very important parts of my life but I didnt find relevant
parts for the telling of that life. But when it came to the children, I felt they are still there, they still play such
an important part of my life.
If Brink is prepared to write a book that expresses contrition by men to the female race as a group, wouldnt
the next step then be to write a personal act of contrition, to the women he has harmed?
All I can say is that it may well happen, Brink says with a slight laugh. Im not sure if hes amused by the
question or annoyed by it.
It would require that at a given moment, through the vehicle of a particular story, I feel the need to take that
further step That is certainly not impossible. At the moment I dont know. Im usually surprised by my
stories as they come and present themselves to me, so, who knows?
It is impossible not to ask Brink about sex.
Its one of the territories where people cross the distances that normally separate them, most urgently and
most spectacularly. So I simply cannot ignore that.
It has to form a vital part of my writing.
While there are some good scenes, there are also some flops. Brink was a runner up in the UK Literary Review
magazines Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The entry, from his 2004 novel Before I Forget contained the following:
The most tousled, tangled pubic patch through which I have ever had to find my way. A near impenetrable
little forest, a small private Amazon to get lost in I would plunge into her from above like a diver in search
of abalone.
I ask if he wishes he could write sex better. He giggles.
I could almost ask which writer in the world hasnt been in that position before. I find myself in rather
splendid company in many respects
Writing about sex is like writing about being sick, I suggest. Both are such basic experiences it is hard to
describe them in a way that is interesting. Brink agrees.
Because sex is so common, precisely because every individual has to experience it and explain it and find a
34

way of expressing it. But that it is so difficult to find something new to say about it makes it much more of a
challenge.
And, as Brink points out, the same applies to nudes, as with the exhibition.
One really discovered how trite, how hackneyed, the human figure, the female figure, becomes Some were,
frankly, boring. But a few really made one understand something new about the human figure again.
Which were they? What did they say to you?
Something about vulnerability. Something about the effort of representation. I was conscious not just of the
models, but of the interaction between the model and the painter. It was an attempt to come to grips with what
that model represented
I return to the gallery and go to the area Brink describes. A pair of charcoal sketches on paper by Nick Bashall
confront me. One, Nude Study, shows a woman facing away from the viewer. A second, Reflecting Nude, has
a woman in profile on an armchair.
The drawings are engaging. There is a sense of forlornness, of a broken relationship. If a picture says a
thousand words, then Brink could definitely find the right thousand. I have no doubt he could do it in less.
I think it was the attempt to go behind the masks which fiction inevitably wears to find out what things I had
experienced which resulted in the fiction What one writes is invariably prompted by something. You then
try to interpret that yourself in the guise of a story Michael Bleby

35

RIP Andr Brink

AUTHOR BRINK HAILED FOR COURAGE, KINDNESS
Sunday Times 8 February 2015
SOUTH Africa is mourning the loss of one of its foremost literary figures after author Andr Brink died on a
Friday night flight from Amsterdam to Cape Town.
The award-winning, prolific writer, who had been in poor health, was 79 years old.
He and his wife, author Karina Szczurek, were on a KLM flight, returning from Belgium, where Brink had
been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Francophone Universit catholique de Louvain.
A close friend of his wife, Cape Town editor and writer Helen Moffett, said Szczurek broke the news to her
early yesterday morning via a text message.
I really hope it happened when he nodded off to sleep ... He was facing health issues in the last five to six
months. He was looking frail, but he was well enough to travel to Belgium, said Moffett.
She said Szczurek was with friends and shes not taking any calls.
Moffett paid tribute to the help Brink had given to young authors. That was very important to him, she said.
Brink , who wrote in Afrikaans and English, was a professor of English at the University of Cape Town.
Kennis van die Aand, published in 1973, became the first Afrikaans book to be banned by the South African
government.
Along with other influential Afrikaans writers, Brink was part of the Sestigers movement that challenged the
apartheid orthodoxy of the time.
He wrote about 30 books. One of his novels, A Dry White Season, published in 1978, dealt with a teacher,
Ben du Toit, who goes in search of justice after the murder of a black boy. In 1989, it was turned into movie
starring Marlon Brando.
Among those who paid tribute to Brink on Twitter were the University of the Free States vice-chancellor,
Professor Jonathan Jansen, who said: This generation should know what a courageous thinker, writer and
activist Andr Brink was. RIP great South African.
Award-winning South African author Lauren Beukes expressed shock at the news. She tweeted: Just heard
about Andr Brink . He mentored me and many young S. African writers. Giant of the imagination and
compassion. What a loss.
Minister of Arts and Culture Nathi Mthethwa said: He was one of those distinguished writers who used his
pen to fight apartheid. He made the idiom The pen is mightier than the sword so true. His death is a great
loss to South Africa. Monica Laganparsad
36

Thank you for reading this

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