Moving “Out of the Laager” and “Betraying the Tribe”: André Brink as Cultural Mediator

Abstract

André Brink (1935–2015) was an eminent South African writer, particularly known for his novels portraying the realities of apartheid South Africa. He was also a playwright, translator, self-translator, academic, literary critic and political commentator. The publications resulting from these different roles that Brink took on throughout his life are multilingual; they engage, on various levels, with the changing political landscape in South Africa, and address, directly or indirectly, issues of language, identity, history, culture, the responsibility of the writer, etc.1 These works are cultural products—the effects of discursive transfer practices, as will be shown in this paper—that engage with, and to a large extent reflect, the specific context(s) in which they were produced.