REMEMBERING A FREEDOM FIGHTER

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 8 Jan 2010

Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim - Socialist Worker

The authors, who edited Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader, describe the contribution of a great poet and political activist.

AFTER ALL the wonderful tributes to South African activist and poet Dennis Brutus following his death December 26, another may seem superfluous. But having spent considerable time interviewing Dennis and researching his life and work, we wanted to add our own appreciation and share some memories with his many comrades, colleagues and admirers.

Like them, we share their profound sense of loss of this sweet, generous fighter for social justice, and we hope to encourage a new generation of activists to examine what will be his enduring political and artistic legacy.

Dozens of obituaries–not just from the left, but including the New York Times and Financial Times–recorded Dennis’s milestones: his birth in the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and his emergence as an educated South African "colored" just as apartheid rule was imposed in 1948.

Dennis’s efforts to organize an Olympic boycott set off a chain of events that left him shot by a South African cop and imprisoned alongside Nelson Mandela for 18 months. He would go on to play the leading role in isolating racist South Africa from international sporting bodies as part of a global anti-apartheid movement.

All this was accomplished, of course, as Dennis made an international mark as a poet. Dennis’s signature political poems, such as “Sharpeville,” with its heart-stopping line, “bullet-in-the-back day,” captured the horror of apartheid forces’ slaughter of 69 unarmed people in 1961. But Brutus’ poetry from that era resonates wherever government repression comes down on fighters for justice and freedom. His 1963 poem, “The sounds begin again,” could be written of present day Iran, Honduras or Burma:

The sounds begin again;
the siren in the night
the thunder at the door
the shriek of nerves in pain.

Importunate as rain
the wraiths exhale their woe
over the sirens, knuckles, boots;
my sounds begin again.

With the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s, Dennis continued his struggle for justice in his country with campaigns that usually put him at odds with Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki. Dennis dedicated himself to the struggle to eradicate what Mbeki himself called global apartheid–a world order in which the wealthy and powerful secure their interests at the expense of the world’s workers and the poor.

In a speech in South Africa in 2001, Brutus made it clear why his struggle continued long after the apartheid regime had gone:

“Nkosi Sikelel’ I Afrika.” “God Bless Africa.” We sang this song on Robben Island on Africa Freedom Day, the anniversary of the adoption of the Freedom Charter. Singing was forbidden. So was whistling. The punishment: three meals denied. A day breaking rocks on an empty stomach.

In prison in the 1960s, we starved for a day to sing “Nkosi Sikelel’” Now that this song is our national anthem, our people are starving whilst the politicians sing and the corporate bosses feast. Enough is enough! Let us take to the streets! Down with global apartheid, down!

Defenders of the new South Africa often dismissed Dennis’s criticisms–including his efforts in the campaign to win reparations from apartheid’s corporate profiteers in the U.S. and other countries–as the complaints of an aging militant who couldn’t face the complexities of governing a post-apartheid society.

To Dennis, however, the political work of his later years had an essential continuity, based on convictions formed when he was a young high school teacher organizing against the forced removal of the so-called colored ghetto where he lived in Port Elizabeth in the late 1940s. After Dennis took over a community meeting with a militant speech that rallied the locals to the resistance, a friend acknowledged Dennis’s effectiveness–and then asked, “Do you have the stamina?”

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HALF A century later, the answer to that question couldn’t be clearer. But Dennis always brushed aside the notion that he was exceptional among the South Africans of his generation who committed themselves to the anti-apartheid struggle.

Dennis became a socialist and a Trotskyist, later moving close to the African National Congress (ANC) and key members of the South African Communist Party (SACP). By the mid-1950s, the ANC was surging forward in step with other movements to decolonize African and Asia, and Dennis’s close friends and comrades included central figures in the anti-apartheid movement: Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Albert Luthuli, Ruth First, Mandela and many others.

When repression drove the movement underground following the Sharpeville massacre of 1961, Dennis did his part to keep the resistance alive. At one point, he sheltered Mandela in his home. To pass the time, Mandela, a former amateur fighter, taught Dennis’ sons how to box. Soon, Dennis himself was banned–prohibited from all political activity–and could only continue his work at great risk.

Dennis had long been targeted by the apartheid regime for his attempts to isolate South Africa from international sporting authorities. Sports in South Africa were segregated along with everything else, with separate teams for whites, “coloreds,” “Natives”–Africans–Indians and others.

“The sports thing–and this is true of most everything I’ve done–dropped in my lap,” Dennis told us, explaining that he had stepped forward to coach several high school sports teams when no one else would do so. Sports converged with his political activity when he helped launch the South African Sports Association–later the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee—which built an international effort to get South Africa boycotted by international sports organizations.

In a witty 1961 article in the ANC’s magazine, Fighting Talk, Brutus anticipated eventual success in getting racist South Africa banned from the Olympics and other international sporting events: “When there is equality on the sports field, or when it becomes impossible to stave it off, or when our sportsmen are deprived of the drug of sports and look at the country beyond the sports field, then apartheid South Africa will go down the drain.”

Before Brutus could see that victory, of course, he would endure a bullet through his body, and beatings and other abuse in Robben Island prison. Released in 1965 and placed under house arrest, he was able to secure an exit visa a year later with support of literary friends and sports colleagues, and resumed his activism in London. By 1970, he had moved to the U.S., taking a teaching post at Northwestern University near Chicago, and later at the University of Pittsburgh.

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EXILE WAS painful, but it afforded Brutus a new opportunity to publish and organize on an international scale. He became an increasingly sharp thorn in the side of longtime International Olympic Committee chief Avery Brundage, a reactionary who was ultimately compelled to admit that South Africa’s Nazi-like restrictions on sports teams didn’t quite square with the Olympic credo of fair play.

A full-time professorship and an even busier engagement as an anti-apartheid activist would have consumed most people’s capacity. Moreover, in the early 1980s, Dennis successfully fought off the Reagan administration’s efforts to deport him, with the help of a large and well-organized defense campaign.

But Dennis’ poetry flourished in this period as well. While activists rightly treasure his most political verse, his work has many other dimensions, focusing on life’s most intimate and intense experiences with great economy and precision. The closing lines of his December 2005 poem, “New Orleans,” provide an example:

once, by Hotel Sonesta, we parted
with acerbic rasping friction;
perhaps that too-blatant sexual flaunt
–publicly uncaring like birds copulating–
repelled, made our private desire obscene.

Dennis’ literary endeavors went beyond his own poetry. He was an astute literary critic and was central to an academic rebellion that put African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o onto university curriculums, helping blaze a trail for today’s study of postcolonial literature. He was active in the short-lived African Writers Union in the early 1970s, a cultural front in the national liberation and anti-apartheid struggles.

Dennis, who disdained any attempt to separate sports from politics in South Africa, was insistent on the political responsibilities of the African writer. “What we are engaged in is a struggle against imperialism,” he said in a 1974 speech. “It is not a local, nor even a national struggle. We see ourselves as an element in the global struggle against imperialism. This seems to me to be the truly revolutionary element in our struggle for cultural liberation.”

In his sixty-plus years of activism, Dennis accumulated an astonishing range of contacts–from Mandela and Sisulu to the poet W.H. Auden and boxer Muhammad Ali. At the fall of apartheid, he could have easily returned home to South Africa, a comfortable university post and retirement.

Instead, he generalized his struggle to a world that was growing steadily more unequal in the supposed “triumph of capitalism” that followed the end of the Cold War. Dennis was a founder of the 50 Year is Enough network to oppose the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, a key figure in the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and a fixture at the World Social Forums that began in Brazil in 2001.

Dennis relished working with a new generation of activists in South Africa and around the world. His authority in the global justice movement came not only from his impressive contributions of the past, but his lacerating critiques of the international financial institutions and neoliberal capitalism that we face today.

At a speech at the 2005 meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized countries in Scotland, he said, “I have to remind you that the source of poverty, the engine and the generator of poverty, the system and the structures that have created massive poverty throughout the world emanate from the G8. They are the source. They are the source of our suffering, the source of our pain, the source of our oppression.”

The alternative Dennis put forward was the same one he advocated as a militant teacher in the 1940s: socialism.

Dennis passed away surrounded by family and comrades who will continue his struggle. But his contributions are lasting ones–and continue every time a new activist or a veteran fighter is inspired by his struggles and his art. This untitled poem from 1975 stands as a fitting farewell–and a call to action–from the beloved comrade that we’ll miss so much:

I am a rebel and freedom is my cause
Many of you have fought similar struggles
therefore you must join my cause:
My cause is a dream of freedom
and you must help me make my dream reality:
For why should I not dream and hope?
Is not revolution making reality of hopes?
Let us work together that my dream may be fulfilled
that I may return with my people out of exile
to live in one democracy in peace.
Is not my dream a noble one
worthy to stand beside freedom struggles everywhere?

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