Wine, song and a broomstick in Breyten’s paradise

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH'S work profoundly shaped literature and the arts, both in South Africa and abroad. Much of his large body of creative output fearlessly addressed themes of exile, identity and justice. He wielded a rapier pen and was comfortable producing works in Afrikaans, English and French, and across media ranging from poetry and prose to theatre and fine art. Shining through his creations was an intolerance of injustice and contempt for the venal, corrupt leaders of both the old regime and the new.

Breyten was witty, gentle, entertaining and a formidable intellect. He was part of my life since childhood. Long before I was born, he was friends with my two uncles – François and Uys Krige – as well as my parents and sister Grethe. Breyten was imprisoned during my school years, but his wife, Yolande, stayed with us for long periods. He spent his first night of freedom in our Newlands home, at one point having to hide out in my attic bedroom (surrounded by model Spitfires and Messerschmitts), a scene recalled in his prison memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.

Despite living much of his life in France, Breyten had a close, complicated and umbilical relationship with South Africa. In A Season in Paradise, he writes: “This earth speaks as no earth anywhere else, my people lie buried in this ground ... I love this soil, this land with its people, as the eye loves the light."

Having grown up in Bonnievale, particular corners of the rural Western Cape  drew him back repeatedly throughout his life. Often in his writing, Breyten depicts the locales that were sacred to him as a version of paradise, places where he could find solace, no matter what other tribulations and stresses South Africa and the world might confront him with. This idea is presented most eloquently in two works that bookend his time in prison: ’n Seisoen in die Paradys and Return to Paradise.

The first is the travelogue of a journey around South Africa with Yolande in the summer of 1973 after 13 years’ exile in France. Their three-month sojourn caused so much controversy and media attention that the National Party government forbade any future visits. When he did return, clandestinely and illegally in 1975, he was arrested, tried for terrorism and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment.

A Season in Paradise is described by writer Andrei Codrescu as “a spiritual journey, an earthly travelog, a poet’s chronicle of his soul, the mythic biography of a country, an exotic picture album, a revolutionary treatise, a wrenching lament for a dying species". The book’s climax is a hike through the Cederberg with a group of friends. Among them was my father, who fortunately packed his camera. The hike came at the end of Breyten’s frenetic sojourn and offered an opportunity to escape the media, the tailing police and the ruckus, “to walk the soot and the nightmares out of our bodies, to find, without it being spoken, a point of silence again".

Breyten had visited the Berg several times in his youth. “Always, even from the very beginning, as far back as I can remember, the Cederberg Mountains have been a place of refuge; but more than that, a place of magic, a prehistoric place, where there are no complications and little pain, where it is possible to touch the edge of the earth, virgin, undefiled, unknown, yet devoid of all peril; mountains without questions where the moon is born from a gorge and extinguished in the sea."

In one of my late father’s albums, I found the photographs of that journey, faded images of a band of smiling, carefree hikers set against a backdrop of ochre mountains. What had been their exact route, I wanted to know, and who were the other members of the hiking party? Before Breyten died, I sent him an email with attached pictures and received a reply from Paris the next day. He identified the other hikers as the writer Jan Rabie, publisher Daantjie Saayman and wife Nici, architect Barrie Biermann, activist James Polley, poet Barend Toerien, Quentin Otto (Breyten’s brother-in-law) and oom Frederik, a mountain guide and one of the legendary, cave-dwelling Joubert family whose donkeys transported their baggage and alcohol – “the holy of holies in their clinking bottles".

Breyten explained that they had set off from Welbedacht and hiked via Langkloof and Eselbank to Wupperthal. “The Cederberg is a good place to dance the ‘Jerusalema' all by your good self!" he wrote, and signed himself off as “Blackface”, although in the email he variously called himself “Jôrs Troelie", “the whitish monopolist", “the prick", “Che Guevara" and “the Fool".

My dad’s photos show oom Frederik saddling up the donkeys, naked men wallowing in rock pools, Breyten riding a broomstick, Jan Rabie identifying fynbos and the tired, happy group arriving at the Wupperthal Mission Station at the end of the hike.

I recently visited the Cederberg and followed their route. Reaching Eselbank, I recalled Breyten’s description of the exhausted hikers arriving at the hamlet in the late afternoon, making camp at the edge of the village, then swimming naked in a nearby rock pool: “The sun touched the wide mountain ranges around us, the cedar trees and the red cliffs, the wide basin in which we found ourselves and the sparse cottages and the squealing children and the dogs barking in the dust and the tall rustling poplars beside the stream."

The hikers bought a bottle of goat’s milk, then picked “Hottentot bedding" and other fynbos to serve as mattresses for their sleeping bags. Sitting around the fire, they sipped whiskey and wine, talked, joked and sang long into the night. At one point, oom Frederik broke into a hymn, “harmonising with the dark and holding his hat on his head with a long forearm while looking deeply into the smoke".

Leaving Eselbank the next morning, the hikers made the steep, winding descent towards Wupperthal until, coming over a rise, they saw the mission station laid out below, “small, almost shy little monuments to man’s presence in this vastness: cottages, a church, patches of cultivated earth". They bought velskoene at the shoe factory founded by Louis Leipoldt’s grandfather, Gottlieb, and had tea with the dominee. Then Yolande arrived to spirit Breyten back to the city where his father had fallen gravely ill and packs of journalists and interrogation by the authorities awaited, followed by an imminent return to France. But that mountain odyssey through “paradise" had left a profound impression on him; memories he could hold close to his heart in the coming years in jail.

In 1991, a few years after being released from prison, Breyten returned for another three-month sojourn in South Africa, to walk the paths of his childhood and reacquaint himself with the land. He wrote some of Return to Paradise while staying at our family home in Simon’s Town. Fairview is a 200-year-old farmhouse set on terraces of olive, fig and pomegranate trees high on Red Hill overlooking False Bay.

After years in Pollsmoor Prison, Fairview (which he calls “Paradise House" in the book) provided a tranquil space and time for Breyten to renew his love of this land and re-evaluate his painful, often conflicted, relationship with South Africa. He spent his days in the garden with his notebook and pipe, writing in the shade of a 100-year-old fig tree with long blue views over the bay.

He writes in lyrical terms: “Clouds in the sky by day, an infinity of stars at night. Across the vast body of water, on a crisp day, one can see the white hem of sand running around to the Strand with above that again distant jagged peaks like the backs of a school of magical dragons. At night loops of lights string jewels around the sea’s throat.’

From Fairview, he made trips to the Boland, revisiting the places of his childhood, renewing the bonds. “Burbling stream of brown mountain water, in places overgrown with bulrushes and reeds, early morning scents of the myriad medicinal herbs and sweet-smelling grasses bedecking the slopes … birds like stones from a catapult whirr from the reeds to rise in piercing song against the sheer rockface, blue sunlight lights up the higher reaches but down here it is cool … This is my world, my voice fits precisely in these patterns of speech, my eyes see the same aloes the ancestors did."

Over the ensuing years, the world was Breyten’s stage and he was an inveterate traveller – forever oscillating between Africa, Europe and America – but in his heart South Africa, and the rural Western Cape in particular, remained home: those timeless Boland villages, contorted sandstone formations, crystal-clear mountain streams and nights spent on a bed of fynbos under the stars. At his funeral in Paris on 3 December last year, it was indeed fitting that his faithful red velskoene lay at the foot of his coffin, symbolically spiriting him back to the places of his youth.

• A memorial will be held on 23 February 2025 in Wellington for Breyten Breytenbach, renowned poet, artist and activist. The private event will be attended by his widow, Yolande, and daughter, Daphnée, as well as friends and family.

♦ VWB ♦

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