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South African poet and artist Breytenbach dies in Paris at 85

The South African poet, author and artist Breyten Breytenbach, whose outspoken opposition to the apartheid regime led to him being jailed for seven years and forced into decades of exile in France, has died in Paris at the age of 85.

La rédaction de Mediapart

This article is freely available.

Breyten Breytenbach, who died on Sunday, was one of South Africa's most honoured writers, who found beauty in his Afrikaans language but was horrified at the white supremacy imposed by his government, reports FRANCE 24. 

The poet, author and painter had not lived in South Africa for decades, leaving in the early 1960s to settle in Paris, where he became a global voice against apartheid.

What was intended to be a short and secret trip back in 1975 led to him spending seven years in jail, two in solitary confinement, after he was betrayed and arrested.

French president François Mitterrand helped secure his release in 1982 and he returned to France to become a citizen.

He travelled back to South Africa regularly, according to his daughter Daphnee Breytenbach, who confirmed his death to AFP.

"My father, the South African painter and poet Breyten Breytenbach, died peacefully on Sunday, November 24, in Paris, at the age of 85," she said.

"Immense artist, militant against apartheid, he fought for a better world until the end."

Breytenbach was born in the small Western Cape town of Bonnievale in 1939 at a time when Afrikaans was emerging with a distinct identity as a language, having been derided as "kitchen Dutch".

When in 1964 Breytenbach published his first volume of poetry -- "Die ysterkoei moet sweet", or The Iron Cow Must Sweat -- Afrikaans was not just ascendent but had given the name "apartheid" to South Africa's brutal system of racial segregation.

With Afrikaners in power, their language became ever more associated with the regime.

"I'd never reject Afrikaans as a language, but I reject it as part of the Afrikaner political identity. I no longer consider myself an Afrikaner," he said in an interview with The New York Times the following year.

In his language and politics, Breytenbach pushed back against the strictures of the country in which he was born.

He travelled around Europe in his early 20s, eventually settling in 1962 in Paris, where he met his wife, Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien, who was born in Vietnam and raised in France.

She was refused a visa to visit South Africa in the late 1960s as she was considered "non-white" by the apartheid system.

Read more of this AFP report published by FRANCE 24.