NEWS & LETTERS, Janurary-February 2010
World in View
Dennis Brutus
by Gerry Emmett
South African poet and revolutionary Dennis Brutus passed away Dec. 26, at his Cape Town home. He had been battling prostate cancer.
Dennis Brutus leaves a profound legacy. A poet of prison and exile, he wrote a poetry of freedom and humanity: "...grant their faith that I might hood / some potent thrust to freedom, humanhood / under drab fluff may still be justified..." (Prayer, 1966). Said Patrick Bond, "Given his role as a world-class poet, Brutus showed that social justice advocates can have both bread and roses."
A founder of the South African Sports Association, Brutus was banned from political activity for his efforts to have apartheid South Africa excluded from the Olympics. He was shot and imprisoned in 1963 after defying that ban. He was instrumental in the country's Olympics suspension in 1964, and expulsion in 1970.
Thereafter Brutus lived in the UK and U.S., participating in all anti-apartheid and social justice movements. He also had to fight the efforts of the Reagan administration to deport him in the 1980s. With the fall of apartheid in South Africa he remained active in grassroots political struggles, often as a Left critic of the African National Congress-led government.
Most recently he pointed to the limitations of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, warning against "brokering a deal that allows the corporations and the oil giants to continue to abuse the earth."
Dennis Brutus is survived by his wife, May, two sisters, eight children--and by a great poetic and political legacy for all of us.
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