André Brink

• Born: May 29, 1935
• Birthplace: Vrede, Orange Free State, South Africa
• Died: February 6, 2015
• Place of death: Cape Town, South Africa

Biography

André Phillipus Brink was the first of four children born to a local Afrikaner magistrate and a schoolteacher on May 29, 1935, in the Orange Free State, South Africa. The Afrikaners are descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch and Huguenot immigrants who settled three main areas in what is today South Africa. Brink’s parents shared their home region’s strict Calvinistic Dutch Reformed religious beliefs and evinced the Afrikaner suspicion of and disdain for the Bantu (black) and Cape Coloured (mixed race) peoples of Southern Africa.

Growing up in a household where his father’s judicial work moved them from place to place in the Free State, Brink was exposed at an early age to the Afrikaner Nationalist Party politics espoused by his father and his friends, especially their distrust of the British rulers of South Africa, a remembrance focusing on past grievances, including the Boer War of 1899–1902, wherein Afrikaners were killed in great numbers and placed in the first of the world’s concentration camps. His father and mother were, in their own way, exemplary citizens—dutiful, highly religious conformists careful about doing or saying anything out of the ordinary, and his siblings followed their lead. Brink was the only family member who would openly rebel against apartheid.

Brink went on to study Afrikaans and Dutch literature at South Africa’s highly conservative Potchefstroom University from 1956 to 1959. Feeling in need of a more worldly perspective than that afforded him by Potchefstroom, he elected to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, which he attended from 1959 to 1961. His encounters with French manners and mores, in addition to the opinions of contemporary European writers, led him to see his native land in new ways. In fact, the bohemianism and the literary existentialism of Parisian intellectuals allowed him to find creative ways to break with his restrictive Afrikaner upbringing. It was in Paris that he became conversant with major Continental directions in writing, and he would incorporate European depictions of explicit sexuality and violence into his work.

After graduating from the Sorbonne, Brink returned to South Africa to study for degrees in literature at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, a place he would call home for three decades. His early Rhodes years marked his emergence as a major writer and member of the Sestigers Movement (literally, “people of the ’60s”) in literature, a rebellious group of young people who decried the apartheid policies that treated blacks as subhumans without rights. He went on to teach for many years at both Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town, the latter eventually awarding him the rank of professor of literature emeritus.

Brink published his first novel, written in Afrikaans, Lobola vir die lewe, in 1962, but it was not until the publication of another Afrikaans work, Kennis van die aand (1973; Looking on Darkness, 1974), that the South African government finally saw how subversive his writing was and banned it, the first Afrikaans novel ever to be so treated. Though banned in his own nation for his political views, Brink’s subsequent novels and essays began to receive world renown; his fiction earned critical acclaim for its depiction of daily Afrikaner life, with its complex codes of conduct, its passionate beliefs based on fear and narrowness of mental horizon, its intense loyalties, and its betrayals by those whose eyes were open to the truth. He shocked some readers and many establishment critics with his emphasis on the most overt violence, as well as his depiction of vivid sexual encounters between men and women of different races and the homoerotic undercurrents beneath the dealings of male Afrikaners.

In 1975, Brink published the controversial novel ’N Omblik in die wind (1975; An Instant in the Wind, 1976), and he subsequently produced two major novels of protest, Gerugte van Reën (1978; Rumours of Rain, 1978) and ’N droë wit seison (1979; A Dry White Season, 1979), both of which were banned in South Africa. The 1980s brought forth such impressive novelistic explorations of modern South Africa as Houd-den-bek (1982; A Chain of Voices, 1982), Die muur van die pes (1984; The Wall of the Plague, 1984), States of Emergency (1988), and Die eerste lewe van Adamastor (1988; The First Life of Adamastor, 1993, also known as Cape of Storms). In the 1990s, the decade marked by the apartheid system’s destruction, Brink published several additional novels, including An Act of Terror (1991) and Inteendeel (1993; On the Contrary, 1993), and edited SA, 27 April 1994:An Author’s Diary (1994). In the twenty-first century, Brink wrote the noted novels Donkermaan (2000; The Rights of Desire, 2000), Anderkant die stilte (2002; The Other Side of Silence, 2002), and Praying Mantis (2005). In addition to writing novels, he has translated many works of other authors into Afrikaans, and he has written critically lauded plays and essays.

His major novels and other literary works and his great help in bringing Afrikaner literature into the modern world earned for him three South African Central News Agency (CNA) Awards for his work in both English and Afrikaans; honorary doctorates from noted South African and European universities; the Herzog Prize for theater; Britain’s Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for literature; Italy’s Premio Mondello award; and France’s highly prestigious Legion d’Honneur, to name some of the most significant honors. Additionally, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was twice on the short list for one of Britain’s most important literary awards, the Man Booker Prize. Brink died in 2015 at the age of seventy-nine.

Analysis

Brink possessed the restless spirit of a rebel and innovator whose ideas led him to confrontations with South African authorities during the apartheid era. He was at his best depicting the rural districts he knew as a boy, where white girls and boys often had as best friends the very same black girls and boys from whom they would wall themselves off in adult life. Yet despite the dictates of the old and now dismantled apartheid system, the whites, even as adults, would sometimes surprise themselves by falling in lust—or even in love—with someone of another race. Brink also is at his best when he graphically portrays the human costs resulting from the onerous apartheid laws—the beatings, the jailings, and the state-sanctioned murders.

In his earliest novels written in Afrikaans, Brink portrays those who, being at emotional and spiritual odds with fellow Afrikaners, find ways to divorce themselves from the country’s soul-killing narrowness. During the apartheid period, people like Brink and those characters who resembled him followed their own internal countercultural compass and found themselves aliens in their own land, persons no longer considered part of the “white tribe” in which they had been raised.

Brink, in a large sense, envisioned himself to be the true Afrikaner chronicler of the long, slow decline of white South African power and authority and the rise of a multicultural nation in its place. Through flashbacks, uninvolved narrators, diary entries, and other methods of showcasing the failures of apartheid’s pass laws and immorality acts, its violence and brutality, and its more subtle means of coercing conformity, his aim is to depict how even the most determined efforts to maintain the status quo, to keep fear at bay through the dehumanizing of those perceived as different, are bound to collapse when subversive events, such as love arising between those of differing ethnicity, relentlessly works against the creaky, jerry-built apartheid structure, eventually causing it to collapse.

Rumours of Rain

First published:Gerugte van Reën, 1978 (English translation, 1978)

Type of work: Novel

A world-weary and rich Afrikaner business executive experiences an existential dilemma that forces him to reconsider the realities of apartheid.

In Rumours of Rain, Martin Mynhardt’s ties to his family farm in the Eastern Cape of Good Hope could form a barrier to the acquisitive desires of a land-hungry company that wants to own and control the region outright. Yet Martin is not the sort of person to sentimentalize his roots or to care much about the effect of the farm’s loss on family members and their black retainers.

There are, however, two people in Martin’s world whom he does actually care for—far more than he cares for his emotionally estranged wife, Elise, or his angry, disillusioned son, Louis: namely, his old childhood friend and companion, the political revolutionary Bernard, and his lovely wife—and Martin’s last lover—Bea, an Italian expatriate and political activist who came to South Africa at a young age. Martin’s existential dilemma is whether to help his old friends by hiding important writings that Bernard pleads with Martin to take with him, thereby putting Martin’s life in mortal danger as an enemy of the South African state, or to sell out his friends and resume some semblance of his previous politically uninvolved life. Martin then is faced with the hardest of choices: Should he once again turn traitor to Bernard—since Martin already betrayed Bernard by falling in love with Bea—and destroy everything Bernard had attempted to do with his life by turning state’s evidence, or should he invite certain death by being seen as Bernard and Bea’s accomplice in treason against the state?

Thus, this novel is about the loyalties of the heart, things people ignore only at their peril: Martin’s long-standing marriage to Elise, interrupted over the years by various infidelities; his emotional ties to and sense of responsibility for his son Louis, a soldier in South Africa’s losing fight against Angola, with whom he has not fostered a good father-son relationship; Bernard’s love for Bea that is coupled with his inability to put her before his own powerful political aspirations; Bea’s deep love for her husband, set alongside her physical desire for Martin’s lovemaking sessions with her; and Martin’s loyalty to his own boyhood and the family and farm that were at its center, versus the need for business allies who may come in handy in the future. In Rumours of Rain, love is a choice and is juxtaposed with decisions that betray it.

All of Martin’s allegiances are tested by events he never saw coming. For instance, as South Africa’s once seemingly unified, apparently strong facade develops cracks through participation in border wars and skirmishes, such as the conflict with Angola, young men like Louis are drafted into hellish and ill-conceived conflicts of attrition. Martin, wanting very much to see his “white tribe” winning, fails to be able to envision the failure of that enterprise, something of which Louis could apprise him, if he would only ask, for Louis has participated in war, unlike his father and other Afrikaners who cheer on the troops from their own safe and secure vantage point far from the front lines.

Linked in Martin’s mind with Bernard’s final day in court, before he is taken away by the thugs who run South Africa, is the death of his father, who though learned never found ways to leave behind his distorted Afrikaner concept of the world; readers readily see that same stubborn determination in Martin to be true to the traditional Afrikaner ways of thinking and doing. Yet Martin, unlike his father, who lived when apartheid was at its peak, cannot hang on to the past though he tries, just as he literally cannot hang onto his family’s farm. Historical forces now dictate that he open his closed mind to a new world order, one that has engulfed his nation, and yet he never really does.

Bernard, however, is the true cycle-breaker of the piece—the true rebel, passionate and self-denying in his search for a transformed, reconfigured South Africa where all people can be free. He is the one at novel’s end who is the agent of political change—-that “rain” from the book’s title that will fall hard and fast on this spiritually and morally drought-stricken place, a stream of destruction that brings new life. Yet Martin, almost despite himself, ends up becoming one with the redemptive flood of political action advocated by Bernard and Bea, and he gives up his life to the higher cause they espouse. Readers do see him as redeemed from what had been a bigoted, sorry, shallow, selfish, and morally diminished existence.

A Dry White Season

First published:’N droë wit seison, 1979 (English translation, 1979)

Type of work: Novel

A white teacher’s quest for authenticity leads him to abandon family and friends to fight the racist South African apartheid system in order to find justice for a black man and his son who were murdered by that system.

In A Dry White Season, a successful novel which became a successful motion picture, Brink visits familiar terrain, namely Afrikaner South Africa (as opposed to British South Africa) at a time of moral and spiritual drought just prior to the coming of the storms of change that will bring this nation rain and renewal. As did his earlier novel, Rumours of Rain, Brink’s A Dry White Season gives readers a white South African protagonist, but this time one more in keeping with Brink’s own actively subversive nature, as well as one in tune with Steve Biko, a real-life hero who died after being tortured and killed while in the custody of the South African police at the very time this novel was written.

Unlike the narrator in Rumours of Rain, the generally self-seeking businessman Martin Mynhardt, this book concerns Ben du Toit, who from his student days has been an agent of resistance against the powers fostering the injustice he sees festering in his country. When Ben finds that Jonathan, the son of his school’s gardener, Gordon Ngubene, has had his skin deeply scored six times by a knife while being detained by police on suspicion of being part of a minor melee, he becomes enraged. Jonathan Ngubene has been supported by Ben and is a kind of son to him, so this act of brutality against Jonathan is appalling to Ben. Things, however, get worse when Ben finds that Gordon, the boy’s father, has disappeared after he searched for his son, who was in police custody. Gordon vanishes into the police state netherworld of apartheid secrecy, and Ben finds he must investigate Gordon’s fate, something that brings on his own destruction and martyrdom.

In this novel, Brink manages to deliver the physicality of his native South Africa, especially in his descriptions of all of those squalid, stinking, rotting, dangerous black townships, like Soweto, where the poor black majority of South Africans attempt to survive, but also in the glorious revealed splendor of that country’s veld lands with its famous animal denizens. Yet another sight, one even more memorable, is revealed when the curtain is parted and readers see state lock-ups filled with the detritus of despairing convicts, places where torture is a daily occurrence. Here is the state’s fearsome underbelly, a place where fear breeds hatred toward the feared. On the other hand, Brink also gives readers glimpses of humanity among the worst of these guards and torturers, seeing them as vulnerable persons whose pathetic lives are bound up in fear of “the Other,” here represented best by Gordon, Jonathan, and then Ben.

Brink’s readers function as both judge and jury for the old apartheid state of South Africa in the world’s courthouse of opinion. As prosecuting attorney, the author could be seen to say to them, as any good prosecutor would, “Here is the system we Afrikaners have assembled, and this terrible system does not deserve to live another day!”

Summary

Within each of his works, André Brink depicts the brutal South African apartheid government apparatus from the viewpoints of victims, as well as their victimizers. At his most effective, as in Rumours of Rain and A Dry White Season, he compellingly demonstrates that even the most disinterested, self-serving, passive Afrikaner can suddenly find himself (and it is almost always a man) in a life-and-death struggle when someone he loves is in grave peril after having broken the laws of the apartheid state. He also manages to convey how essentially fragile that state, with all its projected power and authority, actually is when victims stand up to it and expose it to the world—people like former Robben Island prisoner Nelson Mandela. Replacing the heretofore reactionary nation of South Africa with the rainbow-hued South Africa of Mandela is part of what Brink is about in his subversive novels, and he succeeds in helping to bring about incredible change.

Bibliography

Andon-Milligan, Lillian Hilja. “André Brink’s South Africa: A Quality of Light.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 34 (Fall, 1992).

Cowell, Alan. "André Brink, South African Literary Lion, Dies at 79." The New York Times, 7 Feb. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/books/andre-brink-south-african-literary-figure-who-ran-afoul-of-censors-dies-at-79.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017.

Jolly, Rosemary Jane. Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: André Brink, Breyton Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996.

Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and Andre Brink. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.