The famous South African writer, André Brink, died at the age of 79 at his home in South Africa on February 7, 2015. Besides his brilliant literary career, he was one of those white blackbirds in a South Africa under apartheid. Tribute to the multi-faceted man of letters but also to the humanist fighter.
He bowed out on February 7, 2015: the great André Brink. The author of A Dry White Season (1979) in french Une saison blanche et sec (1980) left us, but left us a monumental work that says a lot about both the greatness of the man's soul and his immense talent.
Born in 1935 in the Orange Free State, André Brink is a mix of settlers of Danish and Dutch origin. His father was a magistrate and the young André Brink will soon realize the brutal realities of the society in which he found himself. And later, he will resolutely distance himself from segregation between blacks and whites. This consciousness, he forged it definitively when he came to continue his studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, in France between 1959 and 1961. André Brink realized that here in France, black students were treated on the same equal footing with whites. He was then studying comparative literature there, after his two degrees in Afrikaans and English and a teaching qualification.
The son of a magistrate who believed that his father represented what is most just and good in the world, will definitely distance himself from the iniquitous system of Apartheid the day he realized he was wrong. on his father's justice. And that this justice was only at the service of Apartheid, and therefore of white people. This is what will make the greatness of soul and all the humanism of André Brink.
As for his literary vocation, it was oriented from the start by his curriculum. His passion for languages was no secret to anyone. And the writer also doubled up with another talent as a translator. He translated into Afrikaans including Shakespeare, Saint-Exupéry, Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, Cervantes, Georges Simenon, Lewis Carroll. But his work has been translated into thirty languages.
A victim of censorship in South Africa for a long time, André Brink ended up acquiring an international notoriety which today makes him one of the country's most prominent writers in the world. Among other distinctions, he is the winner of the Central News Agency Literary Award (South Africa's most important literary prize), Translation Prize of the South African Academy of Sciences and Arts, second nominee for the Booker Prize (English equivalent of the Goncourt), Foreign Medici Prize for A White and Dry Season and Martin Luther King Memorial Prize. It was indeed this last book censored by the Apartheid regime that contributed greatly to its international recognition.
With his disappearance, South Africa and more generally Africa thus loses one of its great men who amply deserve to enter the consciousness of future generations and the annals of posterity.
By Abdul Yazid
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