Dennis Brutus

Dennis Vincent Brutus ( born November 28, 1924 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe ); † December 26, 2009 in Cape Town) was a South African poet and former resistance fighter against apartheid. He also used the pseudonym John Bruin.

Life

Dennis Brutus was born to South African parents in Southern Rhodesia. He attended college at Fort Hare and studied English and Education at the University of the Witwatersrand. From 1947 to 1961 he was a teacher of English and Afrikaans in Port Elizabeth, later he taught at his old school. In 1950 he married May Jagger, with whom he had eight children. Because he was involved in the resistance against apartheid and was president of an organization which campaigned for mixed Olympic teams, his teaching and the publication of books was prohibited. In 1963 he had to flee from the government. In Mozambique, he was arrested, extradited to South Africa, and sentenced to 18 months hard labor on Robben Iceland. In 1966 he was able to emigrate to the UK and 1971 in the United States, where he taught at several universities, English Literature and African Studies. In 1990, he visited for the first time in South Africa. Most recently he was professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. He died on 26 December 2009 at Capetown, South Africa.

Works

• Sirens Knuckles and Boots (1963 )
• Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968 )
• Poems from Algiers (1970 )
• A Simple Lust ( 1973)
• China Poems (1975 )
• Stubborn Hope ( 1978)
• Salutes and Censures (1982 )
• Airs & Tributes (1989 )
• Still the Sirens (1993 )
• Remembering Soweto (2004)
• Leafdrift (2005)
• Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader ( 2006)