Poet, anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus dies at 85; was jailed with Mandela in S. Africa

Poet, anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus dies

NEW YORK — South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus, who fought apartheid in words and deeds and remained an activist well after the fall of his country’s racist system, has died. He was 85.

Brutus’ publisher, Chicago-based Haymarket Books, said the writer died in his sleep at his home in Cape Town on Saturday. He had been battling prostate cancer, according to Patrick Bond, who directs the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, where Brutus was an honorary professor.

Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. He helped persuade Olympic officials to ban South Africa from competition from 1964 until apartheid ended nearly 30 years later.

Born in 1924 in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Brutus was the son of South African teachers who moved back to their native country when he was still a boy. He majored in English at Fort Hare University, which he attended on full scholarship, and taught at several South African high schools.

By his early 20s, he was politically involved and helped create the South African Sports Association, formed in protest against the official white sports association. Arrested in 1963, Brutus fled the country when released on bail, but was captured and nearly killed when shot as he attempted to escape police custody in Johannesburg and forced to wait for an ambulance that would accept blacks. Brutus was sentenced to 18 months at Robben Island.

His books “Sirens, Knuckles, Boots” and “Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison” were published while he was in jail. He was confined, but unbeaten, writing in the poem “Somehow We Survive” that “All our land is scarred with terror/rendered unlovely and unlovable/sundered are we and all our passionate surrender/but somehow tenderness survives.” In “Prayer,” written after he left prison, he proclaims, “Uphold — frustrate me if need be/so that I mould my energy/for that one swift inerrable soar.”

Sometimes terse, other times dense and lyrical, his poems were political, but also emotional and highly personal. Forced to leave the country in 1966, he longed for home in the 1975 poem “Sequence for South Africa,” writing that the “secret is clamping down/holding the lid of awareness tight shut,” until “some thoughtless questioner/pries the sealed lid loose.”

Brutus emigrated to the United States in 1971, but his legal troubles did not end. The Reagan administration, which began in 1981, changed the policy on political refugees, making it more difficult for them to remain in the U.S. Brutus fought deportation for two years before an immigration judge granted asylum.

Brutus taught literature and African studies at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh, a distinctive figure in old age with his flowing white hair and beard, engaged in protests against world financial organizations and in calls for stronger action against global warming.

Over the years, he completed more than a dozen collections of poetry, including “A Simple Lust,” ”Stubborn Hope” and “Salutes and Censures.” In 2006, Haymarket published a compilation of his work, “Poetry and Protest.” His work was banned for years in South Africa, but one book, “Thoughts Abroad,” slipped through; it was published in 1970 under the pseudonym John Bruin.

He received numerous honorary prizes, including a lifetime achievement award from South Africa’s Department of Arts and Culture. But in 2007 he rejected induction into the South Africa Sports Hall of Fame, stating, “It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims. It’s time — indeed long past time — for sports truth, apologies and reconciliation.”

Brutus remained engaged and became passionate about climate change in recent years.

In an open letter dated Dec. 10 about this month’s U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, he warned against “brokering a deal that allows the corporations and the oil giants to continue to abuse the earth.

“Better that there is no deal, so that ordinary citizens can make their choices and voices heard, against the marketing excesses for the rich allowing some to gorge themselves while others starve.”

He was honored with the Peace Award of the War Resisters League in New York City in September. Unable to attend the event, he sent a recording of his poem “Gull,” which reads in part, “Gull gliding against gray-silver autumn sky sees a vast miasma of greed slowly encompass our entire planet cries out to unheeding stars to whom wails of children rise in shrill unending caterwauls.”

He is survived by a wife, eight children and many other relatives.

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AP writer Michelle Faul contributed to this story from Johannesburg.