A Poet Against Apartheid

...I turns out to be an African, and Breytenbach's self-description as an " albino," to say nothing of his boast that "I know what it is like to be black in a white country," are further suggestions that he wishes not merely to identify with black suffering but to be considered black...

...Is Breytenbach's attitude, after all, a form of the Calvinist guilt he despises...

...that it is a system with which nobody ought to be allowed to live...

...To understand why this sensitive poet and painter (the second is what he considers his first artistic identity) turned to cultural apostasy and political radicalism, one must understand something of his people—actually, his former people, since after having spent seven years under lock and key he said, "I do not consider myself an Afrikaner...

...He candidly and correctly notes that the South African Communist Party dominates the country's principal liberation movement, the ANC, and criticizes the ineptitude and authoritarianism of both...

...He was promptly apprehended, examined, tried twice on charges of terrorism, and served seven years of a nine-year prison sentence...

...At the same time, South Africa is sufficiently steeped in Western democratic traditions to produce outrage at apartheid even among its beneficiaries, and to permit impassioned, if occasionally censored, discussions of what to do about it...

...After enduring the fierce attacks of black Africans and later a brutal conquest in the Boer War, they doggedly pursued what they saw as their special, separate destiny, defensively nursing their language and culture...

...But it is probably unwise to speculate too much...

...that finger in the eye," says this is the one crime he wishes he had committed...

...that it is profoundly unjust...

...Perhaps he is a victim of the very suicidal urge he decries in the Afrikaners...

...But majority rule...

...This poignant, powerful, disturbing book is a report of those experiences...

...Still, he feels the ANC must come to power on the heels of great bloodshed, although he fears it may establish "a state which may be totalitarian in a different way, and intolerant of alternative revolutionary schools of thought, more hegemonic but minus the racism...

...By turns serious, sarcastic, bitter, and humorous, Breytenbach spills his confessions to an imagined "Mr...

...So does Botha's recent announcement that many urban blacks will now be considered permanent residents of South Africa, rather than of their tribal" homelands," and the rapid dismantling of "petty apartheid," allowing South Africans of all colors to mix in most business and social settings today...

...One person, one vote in a society where blacks could overwhelmingly outvote whites...

...Breytenbach clandestinely returned to South Africa in 1975, carrying a copy of the organization's manifesto that he planned to discuss with "contacts"—his only real crime...

...Born in Cape Town in 1939, Breytenbach observed racial separation at its crudest and cruelest...

...The new tricameral Parliament, which dilutes white power with tinctures of Colored and Asian power, represents a quantum leap in traditional Afrikaner thinking...

...But much is peculiarly South African: the division of prisoners along racial lines, with blacks accorded the worst treatment...

...For prison is a routine element of political life in this unique pig-mentocracy that excludes three fourths of its people from direct participation in national politics because of their " different cultures...

...Nonetheless, faced by the challenge to "adapt or die," as President (then Prime Minister) Pieter W. Botha put the choice a few years ago, a majority will adapt...

...Often accused by critics (including Breytenbach) of cultivating a " suicidal urge" through policies that seem destined to provoke an eventual Gotterdammerung, these devout Calvinists are in reality supreme survivors...

...If one is truly opposed to racism, shouldn't any race, any ethnic background, be good enough...

...They are eager to win foreign sympathy for their nationalism, their institutions and their fear of a Communist-inspired "total onslaught," yet will circle their wagons if necessary and go it alone against the world, following their forefathers...

...Even if we could be sure of the abolition of racism—hardly a certainty—we would have to wonder whether the totalitarian outcome he describes would really improve the lot of the vast maj or-ity of people, as Breytenbach insists...

...Breytenbach, falsely accused of trying to blow up "The granite penis...

...Afrikaners are indeed a strange breed...

...Equally problematic are Breytenbach's predictions and prescriptions (it is occasionally difficult to distinguish them) for his native country...

...Not, however, to Breytenbach and a handful of Afrikaner intellectuals who came of age during the '60s, when classical apartheid was flowering...

...Other, more pragmatic souls of all colors will have to keep South Africa from flying to evils it knows not...

...To the average Afrikaner (and to most other whites, though they are usually loathe to admit it) this would be disaster...

...the interrogations concerning imagined antigov-ernment plots...

...Quite a few of the horrors he describes—the arrogance of officials, the sadism of ill-educated and ill-paid guards, the rackets, the violence and homosexuality of the broad spectrum of inmates—would be found in most such places...

...After an account of his seizure by the security police at the end of a clumsy cat-and-mouse game, Confessions goes on to detail the author's ordeal at the hands of various authorities, mainly in the maximum security institution near Pretoria and at Poolsmmor Prison (the present home of Mandela) near Cape Town...

...Certainly unique were the relationships of Breytenbach and his Afrikaner jailers, who must have regarded him as a traitor, if only to their values, yet occasionally showed him a grudging admiration, requesting autographs and dedications...

...Breytenbach does not claim to be a political analyst or, in fact, a revolutionary...

...Finally, in 1948, their National Party came to power by exploiting the widespread fear of the growing black presence in white areas...

...the torture and cannibalism among inmates of all colors, attributed by Breytenbach to the decadence and despair apartheid has wrought...

...The paradoxes of the society, manifested above all by the ruling Afrikaners, peak in Breyten Breytenbach, their most widely acclaimed poet, who became as well their most celebrated political prisoner...

...He settled in Paris, married a Vietnamese woman, took up Zen and socialism, and joined Okhela, a tiny white revolutionary group hoping to serve as an auxiliary to black revolutionaries...

...Eye" and "Mr...

...In the late '60s Breytenbach left the racism and Calvinism of "No Man's Land...

...He is a tortured soul eloquently crying out at the evils he knows...

...Pious enough to seek Biblical justifications of racial separation, Puritanical enough to censor Donald Duck because hedoesnotwear pants (presumably setting a bad example for white South African ducks), they somehow built probably the largest, clearest phallic symbol on earth, the Taal (Language) Monument, to honor themselves...

...Investigator"—also called "Mr...

...I," indicating that the author is addressing himself too...

...Despite our comprehension of the shame that led him to renounce his people and their "language of oppression" (the book was written in English), we are forced to ask, Why...

...Or is it simply his special version of poetic justice...

...that it is totally corrupted and corrupting...

...Eventually he concluded that "the system existing in South Africa is against the grain of everything that is beautiful and hopeful and dignified in human history...

...thatitisadenialofhu-manity, not only of the majority being oppressed but of the minority associated with that oppression...

...Reviewed by Lorna Hahn Director, Association on Third World Affairs South African headlines routinely deal with imprisonment: the possible release of long-confined African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela, the actual release of his colleague Dennis Goldberg, the results of an inquiry into the death of a political detainee, the arrest of activists on treason charges...

...To consolidate their position they evolved the all-pervasive apartheid system, designed to keep blacks, Coloreds and Asians in their (inferior) places, and built a sometimes sophisticated, sometimes crude, but increasingly powerful security apparatus...