Brutus, Dennis (1924–)

With more than a dozen books to his name, Dennis Brutus is considered one of Africa's greatest poets, his work widely anthologized and reprinted. Born of South African parents in Rhodesia under white minority rule, Brutus graduated from his native University of Witwatersrand to begin a career as a high school English teacher. Active in the anti-apartheid movements of the early 1960s, he played a central role in the international sports boycott which ultimately led to South Africa's suspension from the Olympic Games in 1964. Arrested in 1963, Brutus was sentenced to 18 months of hard labor for breaking a travel ban by attempting to leave the country. He was sent to South Africa's infamous prison camp on Robben Island, housed in the same cell in which Mohandas Gandhi had done time years earlier. During his stay in jail, he worked on his writing and poetry, befriending fellow inmate Nelson Mandela.

Brutus's first book of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles, and Boots, was published in Nigeria while Brutus was still in prison. Awarded the Mbari Poetry Prize for distinction among black authors, Brutus, who was considered “Colored” by the apartheid regime, refused the honor on the grounds that it was racially based. After his release from Robben Island, Brutus fled South Africa, eventually winning the right to reside in the United States as a political refugee, after a much-publicized legal struggle. From his positions as professor at Northwestern University, Swarthmore College, the University of Denver, and the University of Texas at Austin, he continued to fight against apartheid, serving as honorary president of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee. As Distinguished Visiting Humanist at the University of Colorado, Brutus was the first non–African American to receive the Langston Hughes Award for literature; he also was granted the first Paul Robeson Award, in 1989, for his artistic excellence, political consciousness, and integrity.

After the fall of apartheid and the democratic election of Nelson Mandela to South Africa's presidency, Dennis Brutus's political work shifted, in his words, from national liberation to global justice. Working against what he has popularly termed global apartheid—that is, the economic policies of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—Brutus has been a founding patron of the Jubilee 2000 Africa campaign, working for total cancellation of Africa's external debt. He has campaigned for independence and for freedom of political prisoners across the globe, and has served as judge on special panels relating to the death penalty and to the case of African American death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, also participating in nonviolent civil disobedience actions for those causes. Brutus served as chief judge for the Special Tribunal on Colonialism, held in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2000. Now Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Brutus has intensified his international travel for the causes of social justice since his retirement from academic life.