Breytenbach had offended the apartheid rulers and now he was their prisoner. They were going to roll out the red carpet in the form of a show trial with the Judge President of the Transvaal Provincial Division of the Supreme Court (PM Cillié) presiding -- in André Brink's words, 'like a fat, pink blancmange pudding'.

I was ferrying foreign sailors and local 'ladies of the night' around Durban's nocturnal streets in an Eagle taxi when I first came across Breyten Breytenbach's name in the headlines of a Sunday newspaper. In February 1973, he addressed the University of Cape Town's Summer School and what he had to say caused displeasure in the upper echelons of the ruling Afrikaner elite. He was a poet, I read, a Sestiger, who lived in Paris. The government had granted special permission for his wife, Yolande -- who was Vietnamese and therefore classified by the apartheid government as non-white -- to accompany him on a visit to South Africa and how had he repaid their magnanimity? By making offensive public statements -- in English, nogal -- such as: "Apartheid is the law of the bastard".

That's when I knew I wanted to meet him.

From what I'd read, I realised he and André Brink were friends. Brink had lectured me at Rhodes and, as I'd got to know him fairly well, I wrote to him, said I'd like to meet Breytenbach when I eventually got to Europe and...