Born in
Salisbury,
Southern Rhodesia, in 1924 to South African parents, Brutus was of indigenous
Khoi,
Dutch,
French,
English,
German and
Malay ancestry. His parents moved back home to
Port Elizabeth when he was aged four, and young Brutus was classified under South Africa's
apartheid racial code as "coloured". Brutus was a graduate of the
University of Fort Hare (BA, 1946) and of the
University of the Witwatersrand, where he studied law. He taught English and
Afrikaans at several high schools in South Africa after 1948, but was eventually dismissed for his vocal criticism of apartheid. He served on the faculty of the
University of Denver,
Northwestern University and
University of Pittsburgh, and was a Professor Emeritus from the last institution. In 2008, Brutus was awarded the Lifetime Honorary Award by the
South African Department of Arts and Culture for his lifelong dedication to African and world poetry and literary arts. , 1967
Activist Brutus was an activist against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. He learned politics in the
Trotskyist movement of the Eastern Cape. Although not an accomplished athlete in his own right, he was motivated by the unfairness of selections for athletic teams. He joined the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department organisation (Anti-CAD), a Trotskyist group that organised against the Coloured Affairs Department, which was an attempt by the government to institutionalise divisions between
blacks and
coloureds. In 1958, he formed the South African Sports Association, and as Secretary was strongly opposed to a proposed cricket tour by
Frank Worrell’s West Indies to South Africa in 1959, leading a successful campaign to have it cancelled. In 1962, Brutus was a co-founder of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), an organisation that would be heavily influential in the banning of
apartheid-era South Africa from the Olympics in 1964. In 1961, Brutus was banned for his political activities as part of SANROC. As South Africa attempted, in 1968, to get back into the Olympics by arguing that they would field multi-racial teams, SANROC successfully pointed out that those teams were chosen on a segregated basis, leading to South Africa's continued ban from 1968 until 1992.
Arrest and jail In 1963, Brutus was arrested for trying to meet with an
International Olympic Committee (IOC) official; he was accused of breaking the terms of his "banning", which were that he could not meet with more than two people outside his family, and he was sentenced to 18 months in jail. However, he "jumped bail" by trying to leave South Africa to attend the IOC meeting in
Baden-Baden, West Germany, on behalf of SANROC and while he was in
Mozambique, on a Rhodesian passport, the
Portuguese colonial secret police arrested him and returned him to South Africa. There, while trying to escape, he was shot in the back at point-blank range. After only partly recovering from the wound, Brutus was sent to
Robben Island for 16 months, five in solitary. He was in the cell next to
Nelson Mandela's. Brutus was in prison when news broke of the country's suspension from the 1964
Tokyo Olympics, for which he had campaigned. He was the author of 14 books.
Life in the United States In 1971, Brutus settled in the United States, where he served as professor of
African Literature at
Northwestern University. In 1975, he was elected the first chair of the
African Literature Association (ALA). When his British passport was cancelled in the wake of
Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, he was threatened with deportation, and he fought a protracted and highly publicized legal battle until 1983, when he was granted asylum in the United States. He continued to participate in protests against the apartheid government while teaching in the United States. He was eventually "unbanned" by the South African government in 1990, and in 1991 he became one of the sponsors of the
Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Brutus taught at
Amherst College,
Cornell University, and
Swarthmore College, before heading, in 1986, to the
University of Pittsburgh, where he served a professor of African Literature until his retirement.
Return to South Africa, poetry and activism He returned to South Africa and was based at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he often contributed to the annual
Poetry Africa Festival hosted by the university and supported activism against neo-liberal policies in contemporary South Africa through working with NGOs. In December 2007, Brutus was to be inducted into the South African Sports Hall of Fame. At the induction ceremony, he publicly turned down his nomination, stating: According to fellow writer
Olu Oguibe, interim Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the
University of Connecticut, "Brutus was arguably Africa's greatest and most influential modern poet after
Leopold Sedar Senghor and
Christopher Okigbo, certainly the most widely-read, and no doubt among the world's finest poets of all time. More than that, he was a fearless campaigner for justice, a relentless organizer, an incorrigible romantic, and a great humanist and teacher." Brutus died on 26 December 2009, aged 85, at his home in
Cape Town, South Africa, from
prostate cancer. He is survived by two sisters, eight children including his son Anthony, nine grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. ==Bibliography==