Word: brutuses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exchange took place 15 years ago, but it still remains fresh in the mind of Dennis Brutus; he relates it to make a point to the small crowd gathered in the Science Center As a poet, teacher, and political activist. Brutus has stressed the same message ever since the Afrikaners took power in South Africa in 1948 and even more vigorously during his last 10 years in this country: America--through its business and government policies--is proving itself the best friend apartheid ever...
...Brutus may pay for his outspokenness. A professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, III, since 1970 and a visiting professor at Amherst this year, he now faces deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). After years of tireless activism, the man whom a defector from the South African secret police labelled as one of the 20 most effective opponents of the apartheid government may be cast back into the arms of his former oppressors. But this is not the first time he has come into conflict with government authorities...
Born in 1924 in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Brutus was raised in South Africa by his white father and Black mother, both of whom were schoolteachers. After graduating from college, he worked as a teacher, journalist, and anti-apartheid activist until his arrest in 1963 for violating a government "banning order" that prohibited him, among other things, from attending any meetings. He had gone to a gathering of the South African Olympic Committee as part of his long effort to isolate the country in the sports world...
Prison terms, including an 18-month stay at the notorious Robben Island, dotted the next few years of Brutus's life. He tried-to escape from jail twice. Once he got as far as Mozambique, where he was returned to the South Africans by the Portuguese secret police. On the second attempt, a policeman shot him in the back in Johannesberg...
During this period of intermittent prison terms. Brutus began publishing poetry, in which he laments the powerlessness and frustration of the Blacks and the misery of prison life, among other topics. Brutus recalls that he started publishing his poems more to spite the South African government than to fulfill any intellectual dream. "I only began to publish poetry once I was told it was illegal to publish," he says...