SOURCE: "Breyten Breytenbach: True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and Mouroir," in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, 1992, pp. 375-81.

In the following essay, Coetzee provides overviews of True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and Mouroir.

South of the city of Cape Town lies a tranquil, almost rural, suburb named (after the wine) Tokai, and zoned for white occupation only. Driving through Tokai you pass, on your right, forest and vineyard, on your left comfortable houses with spacious lawns and gardens. Then at a certain point the suburban idyll ends, giving way to a monotonous gray wall ten feet high, behind which you can glimpse watchtowers and blank-faced buildings. This is Pollsmoor, a maximum-security prison, the home at one time of Breyten Breytenbach, poet, painter, and convicted "terrorist." The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist is the story of how Breytenbach came to be in Pollsmoor, what he...