Until the end, Dennis Brutus lived as he looked, the shock of unruly white hair as irrepressible as the inveterate activist.
His revolutionary beard served as a reminder of his “ultra-left” politics; his eyes bearing testimony that both love and agony lived side by side in the poet’s heart.
Brutus died in his sleep on Boxing Day. He had been battling prostate cancer for some time.
Like Antonio Gramsci, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and others, imprisonment was to prove his muse. Sentenced to 18 months on Robben Island in 1963 for breaking a banning order, he wrote from a personally anguished perspective that still managed to reflect experiences of repression and torture that resonated across the world.
Banned in South Africa (until 1990), Sirens Knuckles and Boots was first published in Nigeria in 1964. He left the country for England in 1966 and the follow-up, Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison, was published two years later.
Brutus went on to produce 14 books, mainly volumes of poetry, delving into the experiences of prison, torture and exile. But he wrote just as delicately about love and, in later years, would turn his attention to new causes — from climate change to critiques of the capitalist order pursued by South Africa’s post-independence elite.
Spending his final years as honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society, he was a fixture at both the Poetry Africa and Time of the Writer festivals hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts (CCA).
CCA director Peter Rorvik said Brutus was a “conscientising voice that drew awareness to causes well before they were fashionable, motivating and inspiring audiences — Poets like Dennis really drove the use of poetry as a tool to express, through a lyrical form, issues.”
Brutus was born in Salisbury in former Rhodesia of South African parents. His politicisation grew on his family’s return to Port Elizabeth, where he was classified “coloured”.
Instrumental in sharpening sports as a weapon against the apartheid state, he was the founding secretary of the South African Sports Association in 1959 and instrumental in setting up the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee as an alternative to the white “national” Olympic committee.
Persistent lobbying saw South Africa banned from the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo and a moratorium on white South African teams competing internationally that was to last into the 1990s.
Principled to the end, in 2007 he refused induction into the South African Sports Hall of Fame, which included the likes of Ali Bacher.
At the time, Brutus said: “I cannot be party to an event where unapologetic racists are also honoured, or to join a Hall of Fame alongside those who flourished under racist sport — this hall ignores the fact that some sportspersons and administrators defended, supported and legitimised apartheid.”
In exile Brutus was often impish in his anti-apartheid exploits, famously using weed-killer poured on to a rugby pitch before a match to spell out “Oxford rejects apartheid”. This and a march in London helped scupper the Springboks’ 1970 tour of Britain.
Moving to the United States, he served terms at North-Western University and the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught literature and African studies.
It was a case of “not yet Uhuru” for Brutus on his return from exile. He was a vociferous critic of the government’s economic policies and an inspirational frontline activist among the burgeoning social movements.
He was also a leading plaintiff in the reparations case brought by the Kulumani Support Group against multinationals such as Shell and IBM for their roles in propping up apartheid. The case is to be heard early this year.
The mischievous chuckle and stubborn resistance to injustice stayed with Brutus until the end. As Noam Chomsky noted, he was “a great artist and intrepid warrior in the unending struggle for justice and freedom — And his life will be a permanent model for others to try to follow, as best they can.”
Brutus is survived by his wife, May, eight children, nine grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and the world he traversed as a self-confessed “troubadour”.