Just over twenty years since The true confessions of an African albino , originally out in Holland in 1984, were published for the first time in Italy from a small publishing house in Genoa, Costa and Nolan. It was the spring of 1989. Breytenbach, who lived in Paris, was the baby Turin Motor Show to present the book, the meeting was crowded and warm, dozens of articles appeared in newspapers. Breytenbach left for Paris.
Few imagined that within a few month the world, as we used to conceive, immutable, experienced a radical transformation. And with the world, very soon, South Africa. On 10 February 1990, the President Frederik Willem de Klerk announced the release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison in 1991 apartheid laws were abolished in April 1994 for the first time in the history of the country all South Africans, regardless of by their color, were asked to vote.
Among high hopes and equally great contradictions, was born the new South Africa, the "rainbow nation" that in the pages of Confessions appears like a mirage, unattainable. Confined to seven years, from 1975 to 1982, in South African jails for his activism against apartheid and freed after a campaign which took part intellectuals of all countries, Breytenbach projects in her text - indictment, witness, book of poetry - the microcosm prison against the closed profile of South Africa, the "world apart" in which no one (not even the blacks and whites in power, caught in a perverse mechanism devised by them) is truly free. But describing his condition as a prisoner in the midst of other detainees and to use one tool, the word, which is given to use - a tool which, Breytenbach is well aware of the immense powers of seduction and infinite - the writer reconstructs a world of pain and loneliness and arrogance (and even at times of unexpected joy), in which everyone can reflect.
For this, twenty years later, The true confessions of an African albino is a valuable document of an event of recent history that somehow we are concerned, because it is an essential part of a time when no one (the we have learned during these two decades, more than had ever happened before) can "call out". But it is also much more, the story of a descent into hell, the mutation that this experience brings and the opportunity to go back to life, alive.
This text, with some modifications, is the afterword to the book by Breyten Breytenbach The true confessions of an albino terrorist , published in May 2010 by Alet
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