Dennis Brutus

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Dennis Vincent Brutus (b. November 28, 1924) is a South African poet. A graduate of the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand, Brutus was formerly on the faculty of the University of Denver and Northwestern University.^[1]

Dennis Brutus was an activist against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1960s. He worked to get South Africa suspended from the Olympics; this eventually lead to the country's expulsion from the games in 1970. He joined the Anti-Colored Affairs Department organisation (Anti-CAD), a group that organized against the Colored Affairs Department which was an attempt by the government to institutionalize divisions between Africans and coloreds. The Anti-CAD was affiliated to the Trotskyist Fourth International in South Africa. He was arrested in 1963 and jailed for 18 months on Robben Island.

Brutus was forbidden to teach, write and publish in South Africa. Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, his first collection of poetry, was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. The book was awarded the Mbari Poetry Prize, awarded to a black poet of distinction, but Brutus turned it down on the grounds of its racial exclusivity.^[2]

After he was released, Brutus fled South Africa. In 1983, Brutus won the right to stay in the United States as a political refugee, after a protracted legal struggle. He was "unbanned" in 1990. He is the Professor Emeritus of University of Pittsburgh^[3]. He is currently based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Civil Society .^[4]

[edit] Published collections

Sirens Knuckles and Boots (Mbari Productions, 1963).
Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (Heinemann, 1968).
Poems from Algiers(African and Afro-American Studies and Research Institute, 1970).
A Simple Lust (Heinemann, 1973).
China Poems (African and Afro-American studies and Research Centre, 1975).
Stubborn Hope (Three Continents Press/Heinemann, 1978).
Salutes and Censures (Fourth Dimension, 1982).
Airs & Tributes (Whirlwind Press, 1989).
Still the Sirens (Pennywhistle Press, 1993).
Remembering Soweto, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, 2004).
Leafdrift, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, 2005).
Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Haymarket Books, 2006).