On the Death of Breyten Breytenbach

In November 2024, my wife’s and my dear friend, the writer, painter, freedom fighter, and political prisoner Breyten Breytenbach, passed away in Paris, his recurring exile. Years ago, he had already told me that he no longer felt any connection to South Africa, the country for whose liberation from white racism he was imprisoned in Pretoria for seven years. Tributes poured in from around the world, honouring this fearless fighter against the racist order of his country, a system established over 350 years and officially called apartheid since 1948.

However, these tributes, as far as I can tell, all misled their readers. This is especially true of the one published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on November 26, 2024. It could well have been written by the German Foreign Office under Hans-Dietrich Genscher! The author of that obituary did not mention a single word about Breyten’s predictions regarding the decline—or perhaps even the downfall—of post-apartheid South Africa. For example, Breyten’s bleak assessment, published in Harper’s Magazine in December 2008, is completely ignored. Likewise, the destruction of infrastructure caused by massive corruption, looting, and widespread incompetence—an issue Breyten continually criticized—is overlooked. He foresaw, as aptly captured by the cover of the afrika süd magazine’s March/April 2023 issue, the grim reality of post-apartheid South Africa. The cover depicted two Black domestic workers standing in front of one of the typical corrugated iron shacks, with the caption "From Democracy to Disaster" and the date of the first democratic elections. The FAZ obituary’s author, however, refuses to acknowledge what Breyten repeatedly warned against: the folly of imposing a democratic constitution on a region that had never known a culture of democracy and the rule of law.

Breyten Breytenbach and Klaus Baron von der Ropp (1989)

I truly got to know Breyten in July 1987, when we were both members of a delegation of predominantly white, Afrikaans-speaking dissidents, led by our mutual friend Van Zyl Slabbert, to Dakar, Senegal. The delegation famously held discussions with senior representatives of the then-banned ANC/SACP alliance about the future of their shared homeland. Since then, Breyten and I maintained a close friendship. I know that Breyten, together with the great thinker Egon Bahr (DAS, July 10, 1977, p. 8), sought a “previously unknown model of equal coexistence with special protections for minorities” for South Africa. Breyten fully supported the thesis of Otto Graf Lambsdorff, an expert on Africa, who consistently argued that the constitution of a future South Africa must include provisions for the power-political safeguarding of the non-Black minorities' right to exist. According to Breyten—albeit in vain—only in this way could Black South Africa be freed from the yoke of racism while also ensuring the survival of the Afrikaner people, particularly their language.

(Dr. Klaus Baron von der Ropp, Potsdam)