This paper sets out to analyze, through André Brink’s The Rights of Desire, white South Africans’ resentment over the new dispensation in South Africa. Even though the race-based ideology of apartheid was devisedand implemented by people of Afrikaner extraction, there were many amongst white South Africans who were relentless in their scathing condemnation of the immorality of institutionalized racism. André Philipus Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J.M.Coetzee and BreytenBreyten Bach, to name but a few, were white liberals who were conspicuous by their antiapartheid stance. They used, indeed, the vehicle of literature to bring to light the multifaceted horrors of racial oppression in South Africa and, accordingly, went a long way towards raising international
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In an essay entitled ‘The Freedom to Publish’ in Mapmakers, André regards censorship as “the most spectacular threat to the freedom to publish” and links its unconscionable rationale in “the urge of power to protect itself, to perpetuate itself, to prevail” (213).Censorship has the potential to deal a psychological blow to the writer through privacy invasion:
Even the privacy of this process can be invaded or threatened- as happened to me when Security Police searched my house, perused all my notes for a novel, even confiscated my typewriters; as happened to many of my black colleagues in South Africa when, sometimes simply on the strength of having written one poem or one play, they are detained for an indeterminate period, or intimidated in a variety of ways in order to dissuade them from embarking on their search for truth …show more content…
It recounts the life of Ruben Olivier, a one-time librarian who is pensioned off owing to ‘rationalization” and the new political realities in South Africa; his job is then, to his great astonishment, given to a young black wet behind the ears. To cap it all, his wife has passed away, leaving him to lead a secluded life with his retainer, the seventy-year-old Magrieta Daniels. His two sons –Louis and Johann, the former living in Johannesburg, the latter in Australia- wish him to join either of them not only out of fear for his healthbut also for the sake of making sure that he spends his “last years in comfort and ease and peace of mind” (The Rights of Desire 4). But he adamantly refuses to shake the dust of his country off his feet, arguing that he “can look after myself” and, to boot, his housekeeper “enjoys looking after me” (The Rights of Desire 4). The old family home is haunted by an erstwhile slave woman who goes by the name of The Antji of Bengal. Meanwhile, Ruben’s life takes a new twist with the arrival in the house of a twenty-year-old woman, Tessa Butler, whom he takes as a lodger in a bid to sort of alleviate the drabness of his life.Ruben soon develops a crush on her. Interestingly, she resurrects love to his life but sometimes drives him
In an essay entitled ‘The Freedom to Publish’ in Mapmakers, André regards censorship as “the most spectacular threat to the freedom to publish” and links its unconscionable rationale in “the urge of power to protect itself, to perpetuate itself, to prevail” (213).Censorship has the potential to deal a psychological blow to the writer through privacy invasion:
Even the privacy of this process can be invaded or threatened- as happened to me when Security Police searched my house, perused all my notes for a novel, even confiscated my typewriters; as happened to many of my black colleagues in South Africa when, sometimes simply on the strength of having written one poem or one play, they are detained for an indeterminate period, or intimidated in a variety of ways in order to dissuade them from embarking on their search for truth …show more content…
It recounts the life of Ruben Olivier, a one-time librarian who is pensioned off owing to ‘rationalization” and the new political realities in South Africa; his job is then, to his great astonishment, given to a young black wet behind the ears. To cap it all, his wife has passed away, leaving him to lead a secluded life with his retainer, the seventy-year-old Magrieta Daniels. His two sons –Louis and Johann, the former living in Johannesburg, the latter in Australia- wish him to join either of them not only out of fear for his healthbut also for the sake of making sure that he spends his “last years in comfort and ease and peace of mind” (The Rights of Desire 4). But he adamantly refuses to shake the dust of his country off his feet, arguing that he “can look after myself” and, to boot, his housekeeper “enjoys looking after me” (The Rights of Desire 4). The old family home is haunted by an erstwhile slave woman who goes by the name of The Antji of Bengal. Meanwhile, Ruben’s life takes a new twist with the arrival in the house of a twenty-year-old woman, Tessa Butler, whom he takes as a lodger in a bid to sort of alleviate the drabness of his life.Ruben soon develops a crush on her. Interestingly, she resurrects love to his life but sometimes drives him