Andre Brink, author of “A Dry White Season” and many other novels, whose works were often banned in his native South Africa. (AP) André Brink, a South African novelist who challenged his country’s apartheid policies in his writing and who, in the 1970s, was the first writer in the Afrikaans language whose work was banned in his homeland, died Feb. 6 on an airline flight from Amsterdam to Cape Town, South Africa. He was 79.
His South African publisher, N.B. Publishers, confirmed the death. The cause was not reported. He was returning to South Africa after receiving an honorary doctorate from a university in Louvain, Belgium.
Mr. Brink was a prolific author who wrote more than 20 novels, including “Looking on Darkness” (1973), which was banned by South African authorities because of its frank depiction of a love affair between a white woman and a mixed-race man.
“If this is literature,” a prominent South African Dutch Reformed minister pronounced, “then a brothel is Sunday school.”
It was the first time a book written in Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language of the then-dominant white minority that governed South Africa, had been banned. Mr. Brink was declared an enemy of the state and put under surveillance.
“There was a period when he was in almost-daily confrontation with the censorship apparatus,” South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2004. “He was subjected to a degree of persecution, some of it simply small-minded, some of it quite chilling.”
He became internationally known as a dissident writer dedicated to opposing his country’s political orthodoxy and its long history of racial oppression. To ensure a wider readership, Mr. Brink began to write in English as well as Afrikaans. He was a central figure in a South African literary movement that included Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach and Nadine Gordimer, who would also win the Nobel Prize for literature.
Mr. Brink was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, for “An Instant in the Wind” (1976) and “Rumours of Rain” (1978), and was long said to be a contender for the Nobel Prize.
Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who spent 27 years in prison before he was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994, reportedly recommended Mr. Brink’s books to fellow inmates.
Mr. Brink published his best-known novel, “A Dry White Season,” in 1979. The book tells the story of a white South African man who tries to investigate the disappearance and subsequent death of the son of a black acquaintance. He encounters resistance at every turn, a coverup and, eventually, personal ostracism and violence. His wife leaves him, and his daughter turns over information to the police.
Mr. Brink used actual court documents in the book, describing torture and systematic killings by security forces.
“I wanted to make sure no one could say afterwards, ‘I didn’t know’ – the old sort of Nazi excuse – about the intolerably inhumane way the blacks are treated as a whole,” he told The Washington Post in 1979.
Authorities banned the novel, ruling that it was “calculated to undermine the status of the South African security police” and the “ability to ensure state security.”
The ban was later lifted when underground copies of the book began to circulate throughout the country. When a film version of “A Dry White Season,” with Marlon Brando and Donald Sutherland, came out in 1989, South African officials restricted its release.
Mr. Brink’s novels were sometimes praised more for their message than for their literary quality. But his fiction challenged “the idea that South Africa and its (white) people can hunker down and cut themselves off entirely from the rest of the human race in pure sectarian self-righteousness,” literary scholar John Sutherland wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1986. “Brink’s is a noble and in the national circumstances an almost heroic affirmation.”
André Phillipus Brink was born May 29, 1935, in Vrede, a small community in the Orange Free State, then an independent state within the borders of South Africa. His father was a judicial magistrate, and his mother was an English teacher who encouraged her son to study the works of Shakespeare and Dickens.
Mr. Brink was a 1955 graduate of Potchefstroom University, now part of South Africa’s North-West University, where he received a master’s degree in literature in 1958. After college, he spent two years at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he experienced a cultural and political awakening.
“I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960,” he later wrote.
He taught at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, from 1961 to 1991, then at the University of Cape Town. He edited an Afrikaans literary magazine in the 1960s, wrote dozens of plays and essays and translated many works into Afrikaans from French and English, including “Mary Poppins” and plays by Shakespeare. In 1997, he published a scholarly study, “The Novel: Language and Narrative From Cervantes to Calvino.”
He was married six times. Survivors include his wife, writer Karina Magdalena Szczurek; and four children from earlier marriages.
In a 2009 memoir, “A Fork in the Road,” Mr. Brink expressed growing disillusion with life in South Africa and the country’s leaders after Mandela. The once-forbidden revolutionary movement that he had long supported, the African National Congress, had become, in his view, corrupt and incompetent.
The modern-day ANC, he wrote, “has become a disgrace to the party’s history” and “must sadly be branded as the enemy of the people.”
Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004.