Breyten breytenbach biography examples

BORN: 1939, Bonnievale, South Africa

NATIONALITY: French, South African

GENRE: Poetry

MAJOR WORKS:
Season in Paradise (1980)
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985)
Return to Paradise (1993)

Overview

Breyten Breytenbach is one of the major postwar poets writing in Afrikaans, the language derived from Dutch and spoken by the first white settlers in South Africa.

In his works he alternates between outrage at South Africa's governmental policies of economic and political repression of nonwhites, and, on the other hand, love for his country and its landscape.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Growing Up an Afrikaner Breyten Breytenbach was born September 16, 1939, in Bonnievale, South Africa, to Johannes Stephanus and Catherina Johanna Cloete.

The Breytenbach family was among the early European settlers of the seventeenth century who called themselves Afrikaners—the group that would rule South Africa from 1948 until the