A tribute: André Philippus Brink 1935–2015

By Godfrey Meintjes

“When a person dies, a library burns down.” This African proverb ,which happens to be used at the beginning of André Brinks novel, Devil’s Valley, gained a renewed poignancy with the passing of this immensely erudite man: a world renowned novelist, a dramatist of repute, a well- known travel writer, a prolific translator who immensely enriched Afrikaans culture with numerous translations from world literature, a formidable political activist, a ground breaking literary critic, an academic of immense stature and perhaps above all,  a much loved and inspiring teacher.

Rhodes University has strong ties with Professor André Brink. He was a member of the department of Afrikaans and Nederlands from 1961 to the end of 1990 and was head of the department from 1980 up to 1990 when he was appointed as a professor in the department of English at the University of Cape Town. Brink is a Rhodes alumnus and obtained a D.Litt. in 1975 and after he had left Rhodes University, an honorary doctorate was awarded to him.

The acclaimed Afrikaans author, Abraham de Vries, who also taught Afrikaans and Nederlands at Rhodes, in the publication, Encounters with André Brink, comments on Brink’s “unbridled intelligence and his astonishing erudition” while Malcolm Hacksley, retired Director of NELM, in the same publication, describes  die literary insights to which Brink introduced his undergraduate students, as “mind blowing”. In Encounters with André Brink, Elleke Boehmer, novelist, authority on postcolonial theory and Professor of World Literature at Oxford University, remembers  Brink’s lectures at Rhodes  in  the “Modern Fiction” course, which inter alia, included writers such as  Grass, Kundera, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, Levi, Böll and Mulisch  and how she came to the insight: "This is what international literary awareness involved."

Brink   was a prolific writer who, in addition to a plethora of   critical and academic publications, wrote dozens of acclaimed novels. As a novelist he was at times compared to writers such as   Peter Carey, García Márquez, Soltzhenitsyn, Camus and even Dostoyevsky. Numerous awards, decorations, prizes and honorary doctorates bestowed on   Brink, attest to his international standing. Inter alia he received the Martin Luther King memorial prize, The Prix Médicis étranger, the Monismanien Award for Human rights from Sweden, the Common Wealth Writers Prize, and the Premio Mondello in Italy. In 2013 André Brink received the  Médaille de la Ville de Paris, the highest decoration bestowed by the city of Paris. In South Africa he, inter alia received the M-Net literary award and the coveted Hertzog Prize for Afrikaans literature was awarded to him on two occasions. In 2006 he was decorated with the Order of Ikhamanga.

Prof Christie Roode, a lifelong friend, in the publication Encounters with André Brink, states the following "… the phenomenon André Philippus Brink – something which appears on the horizon from time to time, illuminating the whole world around him. Almost like a Mozart, a Wagner, a Copernicus, a Newton or an Einstein, who causes other people to look at the world in a different way, challenging conventions and norms and simply refusing to go with the flow."

André Brink consistently harnessed his above mentioned giftedness in order to end the scourge of Apartheid and to bring about a just and equal South Africa. Prof Jakes Gerwel, the previous Chancellor of Rhodes University, in Encounters with André Brink refers to Brink’s “watchful and critical consciousness, irrespective of who holds power.” He concludes his tribute as follows: “André has graced South African public life. Long may it last.” Alas, Prof Gerwel’s good wishes were not fulfilled. In the South African attempt to build a new democracy and a new nation, we now need Brink’s incisive and sharp social criticism, more than ever. Brink’s absence in the Afrikaans and South African literary, cultural and political dispensation, has created a devastating hiatus.

Brink’s social and political criticism referred to above, was exercised with the roughest courage, but, at all times he remained an almost old-fashioned gentleman. In Encounters, internationally acclaimed Argentinian-Canadian writer Alberto Manguel, specifically refers to his courteousness when he states: "Brink in the flesh was the same humane, stylish, intelligent person as on the page. He was a writer who understood the essentials, and had the grace to pronounce his belief through the words of a fellow writer, Milan Kundera: ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ The words belong no doubt to the Czech novelist, but the sentiment is pure Brink."

During the Apartheid years Brink was the conscience of the nation and it would be difficult to determine the extent of his contribution to the normalisation of the South African political dispensation. The narrator in the last paragraph of A Dry white season (1979) succinctly encapsulates the nature of the engaged texts in the oeuvre:   Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man to say again: I knew nothing about it”. In die post-apartheid dispensation Brink did not abandon his role as socio-political guide and in a lecture in Potchefstroom in 2000 he indicated that problems of racism, injustice, corruption, and the lack of freedom, in whatever guise, concern the world as a whole and remained a moral challenge, wherever they may be in the world. Brink, the humanist,consistently sided with the suffering human being and in this way he joins postcolonial writers such as Mudimbe, Soyinka, Achebe, Farah, Gordimer and Lab’ou Tansi.  In Encounters Antjie Krog accentuates Brink’s ability to empathise with others: “Apart from bringing heightened energy, wit and fathoms of knowledge, bedded in an unwavering memory, he has above all else, compassion.”

André Brink’s contribution to Afrikaans literature was monumental. He entered the Afrikaans literary scene in the fifties with the publication of a number of traditional literary texts Then, with the advent of the Sestiger movement an explosion manifested itself in Afrikaans literature and overnight  Afrikaans literature stepped into line with Modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, Mann and Musil. Brink became a leading Sestiger and lead the way with novels Lobola vir die lewe (1962), Orgie (1965), Miskien nooit (1967) and  a landmark text Die ambassadeur (1963).In this phase of his oeuvre the structure of the texts are modernist in style and existentialist in content.  Kennis van die aand (1973), the first Afrikaans novel to be banned, marks a long line of politically engaged texts which specifically set out to register the excesses of Apartheid. The nature of the protest in Brink’s novels is registered by Ma Rose, one of the narrators in A chain of voices: “And perhaps someone will hear us calling out, all these voices in the great silence, all of us together each one for ever alone”(441).What Brink , in an interview published in  World View (1982) had to say about the figures in  A chain of voices, is indeed applicable to all the figures in his politically engaged texts: "All the characters are slaves of the situation, blacks and whites alike – slaves of history, slaves of the land, slaves of their condition."

The novel The wall of the plague (1984) registers the beginning of a postmodernist phase in the oeuvre. In this phase the project of the novels remain politically engaged but the modernist textual structures make way for postmodern textual exploration. New codes such as, inter alia, feminism in texts such as Imaginings of sand (1996) and The other side of silence (2002); ecological concerns in On the contrary (1993) and the problematics of historiography in a texts such as The first life of Adamastor (1993) are explored. Devil’s valley (1998) marking the beginning of the post-Apartheid phase in the oeuvre, explores counterfactual history and finally deconstructs Apartheid in the form of caricature. Brink’s socio-political commentary was, however, never blinkered or one-sided. In Rights of desire (2002) the text critically refer to “murder, mayhem, corruption and scandals.”(64)

 In 2005 Brink published his twenty-second novel, Praying mantis. The prominent literary critic, Prof Jakes Gerwel, described this high point in the oeuvre as a “grootse” (magnificent) African novel. André Brink’s last published text, a slave novel Philida (2012), is fittingly and movingly dedicated to his wife, Karina Szcurek.

There have been and there are extremely good and even magnificent novelists writing in Afrikaans, but over a period of sixty seven years André Brink, both as a critic and as a writer, consistently played a leading role in the development of Afrikaans literature .Without his monumental contribution the Afrikaans literary landscape would have looked very different and would have been infinitely the poorer.

As an ex student and colleague I am honoured to salute a great man.

André Brink’s departure is a loss which cannot be described in words, but in his written words he will live on. The Russian literary figure, Paustovsky’s words are pertinent in this regard: "They see the truth and they write the truth. Their books will survive, they live and they will go on living and there is no need to worry about the fate of their books." For this reason   the beautiful words from a poem by N P van Wyk Louw are perfectly applicable to André:

my jeug se oopgelate kring voltooi:
mooi is die lewe en die dood is mooi.