Andre Brink

Died: February 6, 2015

Andre Brink, who has died aged 79, was in the vanguard of South African writers exploring the cruelties of racial apartheid. He died on a flight home to Cape Town from Belgium, where he had received the latest of his innumerable literary awards.

Brink, nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, was best known internationally for his 1979 novel A Dry White Season, the story of a white Afrikaner schoolteacher, Ben Du Toit, politicised at the height of the apartheid era by the savage police beating of his black gardener's son. Du Toit finds himself in deep trouble when confronted by the awesome power of the state, having dared to cross the colour lines.

"Law and justice are distant cousins," observes Du Toit, "and here in South Africa they're not on speaking terms at all." Marlon Brando starred in a 1989 movie of the book and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Brink was born in Vrede, a dusty rural town in the heart of Afrikanerdom in the Orange Free State, and brought up in a strict Afrikaans-speaking household that worshipped rugby and refused to acknowledge spoken English.

Many things influenced his transformation from a conventional conservative Afrikaner into a free-thinking man of literature with Bohemian tendencies. Among those events was a two-year stint studying at The Sorbonne, where he was inspired by the Existentialists and a French public politicised by the Algerian war. "I enjoyed the sense of liberation when I realised I needn't go to church on Sunday morning if I didn't want to," he wrote.

Another life-changing event was falling in painful love with the Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker - as fabled in South Africa as Sylvia Plath was in Britain - who rebelled against her father, the chief censor of the whites-only ruling National Party. Brink, who was then in a conventional marriage, said of Jonker: "She was the woman I loved and who nearly drove me mad." Jonker fell pregnant, had an abortion at a time when the procedure was illegal in South Africa and committed suicide in 1965 by walking into the icy waters off Cape Town. On learning of his daughter's death, her father said: "They can throw her back in the sea for all I care."

Brink said Jonker subsequently inspired every human picture he painted in his 20 or more novels, among them Looking Into Darkness (1973), which was suppressed, making him the first Afrikaner writer to be banned by the apartheid government, An Instant in the Wind (1976) and Rumours of Rain (1979).

He was constantly harassed by the apartheid government, but he acknowledged that his white skin protected him - "Black writers might simply disappear."

A great admirer of Nelson Mandela, he became deeply disillusioned by the current South African President Jacob Zuma, especially with Zuma's plans to introduce a Secrecy Bill.

"Our leaders since Mr Mandela have been deeply resistant to criticism and truth-telling," he wrote. "The (press control) proposals do more than just negate the legacy of Mr Mandela's transparency; they recall, particularly for writers like myself, the worst of the apartheid regime."

Married several times, Brink is survived by his sixth wife, the Polish writer Karina Szczurek, three sons, a daughter and several grandchildren.

FRED BRIDGLAND