Masterful Breyten Breytenbach reimagined Afrikaans and SA

Breyten Breytenbach (1939-2024) was an artist, poet, thinker and outspoken political activist who changed the literary landscape in South Africa. He died on Sunday, 24 November in Paris, to where he had first been exiled in the 1960s.

Exploring themes of identity, exile and justice in a career spanning nearly six decades, his paintings were exhibited in major galleries and he was awarded prestigious literary prizes.

Breytenbach was a master of metaphor. Metaphors transcend the literal meanings of words, creating new associations and images that stir the reader’s imagination. But his metaphors leave all definitions and theories about metaphor short.

By joining concepts and words in curious ways his metaphors create imaginative alternatives: “die maan is ‘n silwer skree (the moon is a silver scream).”

Often he would create new words and meanings in the process: “om te onthou, is om te verbeel… ek ontbeel jou. (to remember, is to imagine… I remagine you”) – where “ontbeel” is a new word.

His poetry brimmed with astonishing and often baffling metaphors. But for him, metaphors were never mere literary devices or ornamental tools of poetry, paired with rhythm and incantation. To him, metaphor was an ethical imperative.

This act of sparking the moral imagination was, for Breytenbach, the essence of poetry – and indeed, of art.

The ability to constantly imagine alternatives to the fixed meanings of words, to reimagine concepts like self, nation, group, identity, Afrikaans, Afrikaner and Africa, remained the central focus of all Breytenbach’s creative endeavours, whether in painting, poetry or prose.

His resistance to all forms of oppression and exclusion, which led to his clashes with Afrikaner nationalism and the apartheid government in the 1960s, and ultimately to his imprisonment, was rooted in his resistance to the power of words to fix meanings and confine possibilities.

I grew up in the confined and deeply nationalist, religious Afrikaner environment of the 1960s and 1970s. Afrikaners were settlers in South Africa who would later create apartheid under white minority rule.

To me, Breytenbach offered a radically different way of being Afrikaans. His work – like that of André Brink and later Antjie Krog – inspired me to study literature.

Over decades of teaching his writings, I saw first-hand how they transformed students’ perspectives on art, life, identity, justice and politics.

His words and his life were deeply intertwined. In both, he rejected rigidity.

For Breytenbach, the ethical question – how to live well – and the creative act of using language were one. Through poems, essays, letters and speeches, he unmasked and resisted language’s tendency to fixate, to solidify. In doing so, he resisted the ways in which rigid language contributes to restrictive thinking and actions.

Breyten Breytenbach in Paris on 25 June 2009. (Photo: Ulf Andersen / Getty Images)

Who was Breyten Breytenbach?

Resistance and prison

Magical use of language

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.