Tribute André Brink: In defiance of boundaries

Abstract

With the death of the South African novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator and scholar, Andre Brink, on 6 February 2015, just seven months after Nadine Gordimer's on 13 July 2014, a crucial epoch of South African literature and history inexorably moves to a close. Like Gordimer, Brink had been among the few particularly distinguished white South African writers whose denunciation of white privilege and enunciation of enlightened humane values potentially applicable to all humankind did not only become the presiding concern of their art but was also expressed in their heretical association with the ANC (that is, rather than the National Party or better still the Broederbond). Brink apparently suffered an aneurism over Brazzaville on a KLM flight from Europe to South Africa. Perhaps, there could not have been a more emblematic way to die for a writer who envisaged all his life as a symbolic crossing of frontiers and saw the negotiation of the cultural and intellectual distance between Europe and Africa as the core of his life-long endeavour.