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A journalist from Libération, the French newspaper, came on an assignment to South Africa, and asked whether I could set up an interview with John. I went back to John and persuaded him to accept: I told him Libération was a good paper, I told him French journalists were not like South African journalists, they would never arrive for an interview without having done their homework.

We held the interview in my office on the campus. I thought I would assist in case there were language problems, John’s French was not good.

Well, it soon became clear that the journalist was not interested in John himself but in what John could tell him about Breyten Breytenbach, who was at the time in trouble with the South African authorities. Because in France there was a lively interest in Breytenbach – he was a romantic figure, he had lived in France for many years, he had connections in the French intellectual world.

John’s response was that he could not help: he had read Breytenbach but that was all, he did not know him personally, had never met him. All of which was true.

But the journalist, who was used to literary life in France, where everything is so much more incestuous, would not believe him. Why would one writer refuse to comment on another writer from the same little tribe, the Afrikaner tribe, unless there was some personal grudge between them or some political animosity?

So he kept pressing John, and John kept trying to explain how hard it was for a foreigner, an outsider, to appreciate Breytenbach’s achievement as a poet, since his poetry was so deeply rooted in the volksmond, the language of the people.

‘Are you referring to his dialect poems?’ said the journalist. And then, when John failed to understand, he remarked, very disparagingly, ‘Surely you would agree one cannot write great poetry in dialect.’

That remark really infuriated John. But, since his way of being angry was, rather than shouting and creating a scene, to turn cold and retreat into silence, the man from Libération was nonplussed. He had no idea of what he had provoked.

Afterwards, when John had left, I tried to explain that Afrikaners became very emotional when their language was insulted, that Breytenbach himself would probably have responded in the same way. But the journalist just shrugged. It made no sense, he said, to write in dialect when one had a world language at one’s disposal (actually he didn’t say a dialect, he said an obscure dialect, and he didn’t say a world language, he said a proper language, une vraie langue). At which point it began to dawn on me that he was putting Breytenbach and John in the same category, as vernacular or dialect writers.

Well, of course John did not write in Afrikaans at all, he wrote in English, very good English, and had written in English all his life. Even so, he responded in the prickly fashion I have described to what he saw as an insult to the dignity of Afrikaans.

He did translations from Afrikaans, didn’t he? I mean, translated Afrikaans writers.

Yes. He knew Afrikaans well, I would say, though in much the same fashion as he knew French, that is, better on the page than spoken. I was not competent to judge his Afrikaans, of course, but that was the impression I got.

So we have the case of a man who spoke the language only imperfectly, who stood outside the national religion or at least the state religion, whose outlook was cosmopolitan, whose politics was – what shall we say? – dissident, yet who was prepared to embrace an Afrikaner identity. Why do you think that was so?

My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically.

Was there nothing that drew him more positively to embrace an Afrikaner identity – nothing at a more personal level, for example?

Perhaps there was, I can’t say. I never got to meet his