During the spasmodic repressions of the 1970's, state violence was directed against black nationalists and white liberals, but not least against dissident Afrikaners. One of Brink's closest friends is the Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach, who is serving a nine-year prison sentence after a sordid and mysterious political trial in 1975. As Brink recalls, ''It was all the worse because Breyten is an Afrikaner. It's the family, the clan reaction. One shouldn't oversimplify, but the whole thing was certainly in part a vendetta against Breyten by Vorster.
Brink says, ''At the moment, the immediate threat seems to have been lifted.
I don't feel as hounded as I did a few years ago. They said that if the correspondence went on she'd lose her job, so she would have been stranded. All writers address themselves in the first place to a specific audience, but an English writer here can survive by publishing in Britain and America. He had always been his own translator. He's rooted in the soil of Africa,'' and his chapters were written in Afrikaans.