Writer and painter · South Africa
Breyten Breytenbach
Breyten Breytenbach (1939–2024) was a South African poet, novelist and painter, one of the greatest writers in Afrikaans and a fierce opponent of apartheid. He lived mostly in Paris, where he painted alongside his writing. Arrested on a secret visit to South Africa in 1975, he was jailed for seven years; The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) recounts it. He died in Paris in November 2024.
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Breyten Breytenbach was born in 1939 in Bonnievale, in the Western Cape, and studied fine art at the University of Cape Town before leaving South Africa in the early 1960s for Paris. There he married Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien, a French woman of Vietnamese origin; under apartheid's laws the marriage was a crime in South Africa, and she was refused a visa to visit.
He made his name as a poet in Afrikaans, beginning with Die ysterkoei moet sweet (1964), and became the most celebrated Afrikaans writer of his generation — and, as an opponent of the regime his language was identified with, one of its most painful thorns. In 1975 he returned secretly to South Africa to recruit for Okhela, a clandestine anti-apartheid group, and was arrested and sentenced under the Terrorism Act. He spent seven years in prison, two of them in solitary confinement, before international pressure, including from the French president François Mitterrand, secured his release in 1982.
Painting ran alongside his writing throughout his life: figurative, dreamlike and often unsettling work, including many self-portraits. He held his first solo exhibition in 1964, the year of his first book of poems, according to one source (another puts his first show in Amsterdam in the 1960s). Solo shows followed in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels and Edinburgh; the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem showed six of his panels in 1998 when he received the Jacobus van Looy Prize; and The 81 ways of letting go a late self (2018) was his first solo show with the Stevenson gallery in Cape Town. The film Vision from the Edge: Breyten Breytenbach Painting the Lines follows him at work. He became a French citizen and died in Paris on 24 November 2024.
How to look at a Breytenbach: read the paintings and the poems as one hand. The many self-portraits ask the same questions about exile and identity that his writing does. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
Stevenson in Cape Town and Johannesburg handles his paintings, the UNISA Art Gallery has shown him, and the film Vision from the Edge is listed by the IDFA festival. Ask each what is on view. See our list of South African painters.
