The story begins with the sudden death of an ordinary, good-natured, harmless, unremarkable man. And before long the book was made into a film starring Donald Sutherland, Marlon Brando and Zakes Mokae… Therefore all resemblance between the characters and incidents in this book and people and situations outside is strictly coincidental.Ī Dry White Season was, of course, banned in South Africa, but it had already been published in Great Britain, and underground editions circulated in the same way that Soviet samizdat did. It is not the surface reality which is important but the patterns and relationships underneath the surface.

But separate events and people have been recast in the context of a novel, in which they exist as fiction only. Nothing in this novel has been invented, and the climate, history and circumstances from which it arises are those of South Africa today. In retrospect, readers know that the novel reveals a true picture of the SA security service, but for readers in the era before political reform, the disclaimer on the verso page spelled it out: When we think of repression and surveillance, we tend to think of East Germany and the old Soviet States, but Brink’s brave novel A Dry White Season (1979) reminds us that it’s not so very long ago that South Africa had a brutally efficient system of repression too. In 2012, Brink was again long-listed for the Man Booker prize for his slavery novel Philida.If South Africa had an equivalent to Israel’s Righteous Among Nations – gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis – White South African André Brink (1935-2015) would be honoured for his courage in challenging apartheid through his books. Ten years later, Brando left retirement on Tahiti to take a small part in the film of A Dry White Season, which starred Donald Sutherland, Zakes Mokae and Susan Sarandon, and was banned in South Africa “We sold about 4,000 copies that way.” After several months the censors gave approval to the book, also lifting a ban on Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, and it was released through formal publication channels. “We had a subscription list of those who had bought the earlier books,” he said the following year. The books An Instant in the Wind and Rumours of Rain were both shortlisted for the Booker prize.Īfter circulation of copies of Rumours of Rain was held up for six months by the South African authorities in 1978, Brink reverted to private distribution for A Dry White Season.

His other works include Devil’s Valley, Before I Forget and Praying Mantis. His novel Looking on Darkness, was banned by the apartheid government in 1974. He was born in 1935 in Vrede, a small town in the Free State and became famous for using Afrikaans to speak against apartheid.

A Dry White Season by André Brink