Brutus, Dennis

In the Brutus clan there were indigenous Hottentots , Afrikaners, French, British, Germans and Malays. When at the age of four his parents brought him to their homeland in South Africa, to Port Elizabeth , according to the racial laws of apartheid, he was classified as "colored."

He joined the fight against apartheid, becoming a Trotskyist activist. In 1960, he was arrested, sentenced to 18 months in prison and fled to Mozambique, but was captured by the Portuguese secret police PIDE and extradited to South Africa. He was imprisoned on Robben Island in the cell next to Nelson Mandela . However, while still there, he found out that his activities were not in vain - partly due to his campaign for a boycott of South Africa at the Olympics, the South African team of South Africa was not allowed to attend the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. In addition, his first poetry collection was published in Nigeria .

In 1966, Dennis Brutus was forced to leave South Africa, leaving for the UK, and then, as a political refugee, to the United States. He was able to return to his homeland only after 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid. After returning, he taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal , was one of the founders of the Committee for Academic Freedoms in Africa and actively participated in protests against neoliberal reforms.

In total, Brutus published 12 collections of poems.

The writer Olu Ogibe called Brutus "the largest and most influential contemporary poet in Africa after Leopold Senghor and Christopher Okigbo ."

Died of prostate cancer in his home in Cape Town.