Colonization, violence, and narration in white South African writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J.M. Coetzee

1996 ◽  
Vol 34 (02) ◽  
pp. 34-0749-34-0749
Werkwinkel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Yves T’Sjoen

Abstract This article discusses the Dutch poet Remco Campert’s involvement in the anti-apartheid movement in Holland by focusing on his magazine Gedicht (1974-1976) and his poem dedicated to the imprisoned South African writer Breyten Breytenbach. Campert’s international engagement is part of the actions undertaken by the Breytenbach-committee and other Dutch initiatives which tried to maintain public interest for the case of Breyten-bach’s imprisonment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 707-724
Author(s):  
FORTI ETIENNE LANGMIA

This article, which draws inspiration from the literary works of three South African writers, focuses on the two (amongst many) major historic periods in the life of the present-day nation described as post-apartheid South Africa. The two periods, evident in the works of Andre Brink, Zakes Mda and Nadine Gordimer under review, are the reign of apartheid and the transition to a democratic multiracial society built on the principles of equality and the respect of the rights and freedoms of South Africans.  From both historical and literary standpoints, the transition to multiracialism is the outcome of the struggle of the oppressed black population of South Africa against the oppressive monolithic racist regime which ruled the country on an official governance policy which it called ‘Apartheid’. In order to enforce this inhumane worldview, the said racist regime used means of brutality and savagery with the intention of transforming the country into a ‘white nation’ that would belong to a minority-turned majority known as the Afrikaners. The often callous and gruesome acts of inhumanity perpetrated by the different racist apartheid regimes (that ruled South Africa from 1948-1994) became a major concern to the world at large and South African anti-apartheid writers in particular.  Thus this category of the country’s writers tended to use literature as an instrument of protest against racial discrimination, which brought untold hardship to the black population. Andre Brink, Zakes Mda, and Nadine Gordimer are among the writers whose works vividly trace the South African experience from apartheid to post-apartheid eras. Brink, Mda and Gordimer in their respective works attempt to portray the endeavours and challenges of reconstructing the new nation from the debris of close to four decades of the brutal regime. The main issues discussed in this article are analyzed from New Historicist and Postcolonial perspectives due to the peculiar postcolonial nature of South Africa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 273-279
Author(s):  
John Allison

Long before opera was first heard in South Africa, and even longer before it took root there, the country had its own operatic figure. But Adamastor was not introduced to the rest of the operatic world until 1865 and the premiere of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, where in Nélusko's Act III ballade the terrifying story is told of the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocky spine of the Cape Peninsula and barred sailors from rounding the ‘Cape of Storms’ and opening up the sea route to the East. The literary invention – perhaps via Rabelais – of Luís Vaz de Camões, the great Portuguese Renaissance poet who himself was the first European artist to round the Cape, Adamastor appears in Canto V of Os Lusíadas (1572) and has exercised a considerable fascination over South African artists and writers. But to whom does Adamastor belong? This is a question that some, increasingly, have sought to answer, re-examining Camões's myth from an indigenous perspective – for example, André Brink in his postmodernist novella The First Life of Adamastor, imagining how that meeting with the Portuguese fleet would have looked from the landward side, and the artist Cyril Coetzee in his huge T'kama-Adamastor painting commissioned for the University of the Witwatersrand.


2019 ◽  
pp. 171-224
Author(s):  
Monika Fludernik

Continuing the contrast between personal accounts of imprisonment and fictional elaborations of carceralities, Chapter 3 concentrates on the twentieth century and on (post)colonial contexts. The three authors discussed at length are Brendan Behan, the Irish dramatist; Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author and ecological activist; and Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet. Whereas Behan’s and Saro-Wiwa’s autobiographical texts, at least on the surface, appear to be quite reliable, i.e. factual, accounts of their imprisonment, their literary work, just like Breytenbach’s, is highly allusive, ironic, and allegorical; they model the carceral experience through distortive lenses of comedy, farce, satire, or parable. The chapter also emphasizes the use of the prison and legal criminalization as major political strategies of discrimination against (ethnic and other) minorities as well as political dissidents.


1979 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-77
Author(s):  
Andrè Brink ◽  
Christopher Hope

In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy by Breyten Breytenbach, translated by Denis Hirson John Calder 148pp £4.95 and death white as words by Breyten Breytenbach, edited by A. J. Coetzee Rex Collings 180pp £5


Author(s):  
N. H. Olson ◽  
T. S. Baker ◽  
Wu Bo Mu ◽  
J. E. Johnson ◽  
D. A. Hendry

Nudaurelia capensis β virus (NβV) is an RNA virus of the South African Pine Emperor moth, Nudaurelia cytherea capensis (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae). The NβV capsid is a T = 4 icosahedron that contains 60T = 240 subunits of the coat protein (Mr = 61,000). A three-dimensional reconstruction of the NβV capsid was previously computed from visions embedded in negative stain suspended over holes in a carbon film. We have re-examined the three-dimensional structure of NβV, using cryo-microscopy to examine the native, unstained structure of the virion and to provide a initial phasing model for high-resolution x-ray crystallographic studiesNβV was purified and prepared for cryo-microscopy as described. Micrographs were recorded ∼1 - 2 μm underfocus at a magnification of 49,000X with a total electron dose of about 1800 e-/nm2.


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