Cape Town - Internationally acclaimed writer and scholar, André P Brink, who died on a flight home from Belgium on Friday night, was the novelist who brought to middle-class white South Africa’s bedside table the disquieting truths of a deeply contested history many had assumed would run in their favour.
Some of his books were banned for the trouble he took to rattle white South Africa’s complacency – but the writer outlived, and outshone, his most fervent detractors.
This weekend tributes poured in for Brink who died, reportedly as a result of a blood clot in the leg, while flying home after receiving an honorary doctorate on Thursday from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He was 79.
NB Publishers chief executive officer Eloise Wessels said that in making his acceptance speech at the University of Louvain, Brink had spoken about the necessity of continually questioning everything.
In his speech, he spoke of moving “into the shadows of uncertainty” in the quest for answers.
“He said that the adventure of this search lay in not knowing whether one would find answers, and if there were indeed answers, not knowing what they were,” she said.
“That is how he lived and that same search underpinned all his writing.”
Literature, culture and politics are the binding threads of Brink’s literary tapestry, as a writer, essayist and academic.
But the story was pre-eminent, and his stories did much to alter the imaginative landscape of a white – English- and Afrikaans-speaking – society struggling, in the 1970s and 1980s, with thinking itself out of an intractable, increasingly violent and unsustainable present.
Brink was born in Vrede, in the Orange Free State, in 1935. An undergraduate degree at Potchefstroom University was followed by two MAs, a year apart, in 1958 and 1959, in English and Afrikaans. Both were awarded cum laude. He studied comparative literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, returning in 1961 to take up a post in the Department of Afrikaans-Nederlands at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where he remained (although returning briefly to Paris in the mid-1960s), serving as head of Afrikaans-Nederlands from 1980 to 1990.
He was awarded a D.Litt by Rhodes in 1975.
He moved to the University of Cape Town at the beginning of the 1990s, and was emeritus professor at the time of his death.
Brink was a leading member of the Sestigers, a group of independent-minded Afrikaans writers who clashed repeatedly with the establishment.
His first Afrikaans novel, Die Meul Teen die Hang (1958) was followed by some 40 other publications, including novels, plays, travelogues and literary criticism, in Afrikaans.
His novels in English include An Instant in the Wind (1976), Rumours of Rain (1978), A Dry White Season (1979), A Chain of Voices (1983), The Wall of the Plague (1984), States of Emergency (1988), An Act of Terror (1991), The First Life of Adamastor (1993) and On the Contrary (1993).
A Dry White Season, which deals with death in detention, was banned and then unbanned in 1979. Brink was threatened with prosecution.
NB Publishers published all of Brink’s Afrikaans novels under its Human & Rousseau imprint. His books have been published in 28 languages.
Brink translated about 70 works from English, French, German and Spanish into Afrikaans.
He received the CNA literary Award three times: in 1964 for Olé, in 1978 for Rumours of Rain (also shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and in 1983 for A Chain of Voices.
He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1982, but the prize went to Latin American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
He was also awarded the British Martin Luther King Memorial prize in 1980, and the French Prix Medicis Etranger for foreign literature in 1980. He was made a chevalier of the France’s Legion of Honour – the country’s top civil award – in 1982 for his contribution to French literature.
All his novels have been translated into French and have been best-sellers in French-speaking countries.
Brink was independent-minded in his political judgements, strikingly so in 1981 when he observed that while he was “totally cynical” about PW Botha, “he has introduced the possibility of change and that may carry him and other people further”. History corroborated his foresight. Brink added, then, a decade before the final pendulum swing in our history: “Once a certain historical momentum is created, I don’t think it can be stopped.”
Brink was a thoughtful – analytical rather than merely imaginative – commentator on events, no less so after the transition to democracy in 1994.
In his 1996 essay collection, Reinventing a Continent, Brink writes perceptively of South Africa’s emerging post-apartheid present: “By any imaginable reckoning we still have very far to go; if there is one thing we have discovered it is that freedom is not utopia.
“More than anything else it demands the acceptance of ordinary human responsibility for ordinary human situations. Liberation was not – can never be – an end in itself.”
The author had since made more pointed remarks about South Africa’s “proliferation of ills”.
Brink, who was married and divorced several times, is survived by his wife, Karina Magdalena Szczurek.
Independent Media