A Ray of Hope for S. Africa : Books: Andre Brink, a respected anti-apartheid novelist, says the recent political changes in his homeland have given him hope for its future.

The journey to Andre Brink’s study begins with a flight to the very bottom of Africa, landing over the choppy meeting place of the warm Indian Ocean and the cold Atlantic.

Then it’s a two-hour drive on a narrow, winding road into the rural heart of the Eastern Cape, where some of the longest and bloodiest battles between anti-apartheid activists and the white-led government have been waged.

Brink has been imprisoned in this remote hamlet by his craft. And, in a way, by his readers.

“When you’re living 10,000 kilometers away in Europe, you can really say anything, criticize anything, attack anything and so what?” Brink said recently, sipping a cup of tea in his book-lined home. “But if you’re here, and you know you’re running risks, then a very special relationship between writer and reader comes into being.”

The number of Americans familiar with Brink’s stories of courage in the face of apartheid has increased substantially with the release last year of the film “A Dry White Season,” based on his novel.

That tale of a white Afrikaner schoolteacher’s political awakening after his black gardener dies in police custody was written 11 years ago, during a time when the dramatic lines could be clearly drawn between the injustices of South Africa’s white minority government and the cause of the oppressed black majority.

Now the challenge facing Brink and other anti-apartheid authors has changed virtually overnight. President Frederik W. de Klerk has taken the controls off black political activity, invited black leaders to talk with him and promised to negotiate his white party out of power. As a result, Brink is cautiously optimistic about the future of his country for the first time in years.

For writers with worldwide audiences, though, he said, that means “it’s not so easy to distinguish the good from the bad any more, because the bad have now put on the face of good intentions. Things easing up in the country has taken a certain weight of interest off the conscience of the world.”

The journey of the book and film of “A Dry White Season” in South Africa is a ready example of the government’s changing attitude toward anti-apartheid fiction.

The novel, which won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize in 1980, was banned by South African censors for portraying the police in a bad light. That ban was lifted in 1981 when government censors, pressured internationally to end their grip on free expression, had a massive change of heart on many anti-apartheid books.

But the film, directed by Euzhan Palcy and starring Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon and Marlon Brando, ran into major roadblocks when it was offered for release here last September. The censors declared the film, which graphically depicts police torturing and killing an innocent black man, “harmful to race relations and prejudicial to the safety of the state, the general welfare, and to peace and good order.”

“From the moment I first saw it,” Brink said then, “I just had the feeling that it couldn’t possibly be allowed in this country.”

On appeal, though, the movie was granted exemptions for several showings at film festivals, where it received ovations from full houses of predominantly white audiences.

And last month, in the wake of De Klerk’s efforts to normalize political debate in the country, the appellate board of censors approved “A Dry White Season” for general release with no cuts but restricting audiences to those older than 21. It is expected to open in July.

The appeals board concluded that the film “is directed at serious, discerning adult viewers, and they are likely to see it for what it is: an intermingling of propaganda, cliche and one-sidedness with moments of sincerity.”

Although the author says he’s fascinated with film as a medium, he had turned down Palcy’s offer to work on the script.

“I feel that once I’ve seen the novel through into print, if somebody’s interested in filming it and I have confidence in that person, then I hand it over,” he said. Brink added he was “very impressed” by the way his novel was translated to the screen.

The film follows the book fairly closely, with two exceptions. Journalist Melanie Bruwer (played by Sarandon), the backbone of his novel, was relegated to a small role in the film. “That was discarding something I thought was important,” he says.

But Brink was pleasantly surprised by the way Palcy portrayed Susan du Toit, the schoolteacher’s wife, who comes across as a more sympathetic, well-rounded character in the film. “I wish I had thought of that,” Brink said.

The movie has increased the audience for Brink’s books overseas, but it hasn’t altered his quiet lifestyle. A divorced father of four grown children, he teaches Afrikaans at Rhodes University in this small South African village and will take a new job as English professor at the University of Cape Town next year.

Between classes, the 54-year-old author toils at his computer. He’s now at work on a new novel, tentatively titled “An Act of Terror,” which he says “attempts to deal with this whole fluid situation of today against the background of 13 generations of Afrikaners.”

Brink is an Afrikaner, the descendant of 18th Century Dutch settlers, and, as such, a rarity in anti-apartheid literature. Afrikaners have been the ruling elite in South Africa for decades, and it was the Afrikaner-based National Party that introduced apartheid in 1948, and, now, 41 years later, promises to dismantle it.

The author maintains an abiding fondness for his Afrikaner culture, especially Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language born in South Africa three centuries ago but spoken now by only 10 million people.

Brink wrote his early novels in Afrikaans, his first language. But he found himself silenced in that language in 1974 when “Looking Into Darkness” was banned because of its content. He remembers it as “a horrifying experience. But I had to think of surviving. So I started to write in English.”

Most of Brink’s books today are published in both Afrikaans and English. And writing sometimes in English and sometimes in Afrikaans has become part of his creative process.

“When I’m writing about a personal emotional experience, I may decide to use Afrikaans, which for me is more of an intimate language,” he said. “But when I’m trying to evaluate that experience and look at it objectively, I may use English. Sometimes, it just depends on the mood I’m in on that particular day.”

Brink has been one of the most respected anti-apartheid novelists in South Africa for nearly 20 years. His own political awakening came after he graduated from Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, a small, all-white campus where he was a classmate of President De Klerk.

He left for study in Paris in 1960 and watched the news from home with increasing concern. He traces his conversion to March, 1960, when South African police killed 67 black protesters in Sharpeville, a township 25 miles south of Johannesburg.

For the first time, Brink remembers, he saw apartheid South Africa as the rest of the world saw it. And like Ben du Toit, the character in “A Dry White Season,” his eyes were opened to the injustice of the system.

Brink wanted desperately to remain in Paris but was drawn back to his home country by forces he may have best explained in the epilogue to “A Dry White Season.” Speaking as the story’s narrator and Du Toit’s friend, Brink wrote:

“Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it. “

Brink returned to South Africa, and in 1973 won international acclaim and his first government ban with “Looking Into Darkness,” the story of a mixed-race colored actor awaiting execution for the murder of his white lover.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Brink was harassed relentlessly by the police, subjected to late-night searches and interrogations as well as an unending series of anonymous phone calls. To this day, he said, his mail is regularly opened by the authorities.

This life, so different from that experienced by writers in Western democracies, became an essential ingredient in his writing.

“If you can write anything, why should readers pay any particular attention?” Brink said. “They can pay attention because you say it in a more beautiful or more memorable way, but in South Africa it is the weight of the problem you try to explore that jolts the reader.”

The changes South Africa is now undergoing create even greater challenges for all anti-apartheid writers, but Brink sees South Africa’s transformation as an opportunity.

“It has a certain liberating effect on the imagination,” he said. “The really fascinating thing is human nature, the constantly shifting relationships between good and bad in South Africa. Perhaps it’s better for the novelist to be dealing with this current situation, because you cannot come up with glib definitions and easy stereotypes.”

Whether South Africa’s protest literature will be able to maintain its audience, though, is another question altogether.

“It’s a lot more reassuring for the readers abroad to identify with heroes and villains,” he said. “It’s much more uneasy to discover that both are human. But in writing novels, that is what one is driving at all the time anyway.”