Breyten Breytenbach, Dissident South African-Born Writer, Dies at 85

Breyten Breytenbach, a dissident South African-born poet, memoirist and former political prisoner who was jailed on trumped-up charges for anti-apartheid actions in the 1970s, died on Sunday in Paris, his longtime place of residence as an expatriate critic of his homeland. He was 85.

His death was announced by his family, who did not state a cause.

Mr. Breytenbach was often called the greatest living poet writing in Afrikaans, the language of the dominant white group in South Africa, though he spent almost all of his adult life abroad and was livid that his native tongue became a symbol of racist domination.

“To be an Afrikaner is a political definition,” he wrote in 1985. “It is a blight and a provocation to humanity.”

His loathing of apartheid’s institutionalization of white supremacy began in personal experience. In 1962, Mr. Breytenbach married a Vietnamese-born woman, Hoang Lien Ngo, but because of South Africa’s laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, she was refused entry to the country.

The couple settled in Paris, where Mr. Breytenbach wrote poetry in Afrikaans and prose in English, including a four-volume memoir of his experiences in South Africa. His best-known work, “The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist,” published in 1985, recounted his seven years in prison in Pretoria, including two in solitary confinement.

“They took seven years from him, and he has now struck back with a volume that seems to have been ripped from his entrails,” Joseph Lelyveld, a former South Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote of the memoir in the lead review of the Feb. 10, 1985, issue of The New York Times Book Review.