Dennis Brutus (1924-2009): South African Freedom Fighter

By Nick Gier, Unfiltered 1-09-10

We do not talk, do we
of Blood Diamonds?
We do not talk do we
of displaced peoples?
of stolen land?
of sweated labour?
of bloodied labour?
bloodied diamonds?
for blood diamonds, too,
are forever

--Dennis Brutus 2009

For 18 months in 1964-65 Dennis Brutus occupied the cell next to former South African president Nelson Mandela’s at the notorious prison on Robben Island. Every day Mandela, Brutus, and other inmates were trucked out to a rock quarry where they broke stones with 14-pound mallets.

When I was in Cape Town last September, I waited patiently every day for a chance to visit Robben Island, but bad weather kept the ferries in their docks. No prisoner ever escaped from this infamous hell hole, seven miles out in one of the most beautiful harbors in the world.

Brutus, who died last month, graduated from Fort Hare University, founded by Christian missionaries, where Mandela was also a student and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a chaplain.

In 1962, while prohibited from participating in any political activities, Brutus nonetheless helped found the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee and led a successful campaign to ban South African athletes from the 1964 and 1968 Olympic Games. In 1970 his organization succeeded in removing South Africa from the Olympic Committee itself.

Brutus had a keen sense that sports was an arena where anti-apartheid efforts might work where more philosophical strategies would not: “When our sportsmen are deprived of the drug of sports, then apartheid South Africa will go down the drain.”

In 1963 Brutus was shot in the back by South African police, and he nearly died because ambulances reserved for whites were the only ones immediately available.

In his eulogy University of KwaZulu-Natal professor Patrick Bond offers a significant historical note: “While recovering [from his wounds], he was held in the Johannesburg Fort Prison cell, which more than a half-century earlier housed Mahatma Gandhi.”

Brutus lived in exile during the 1970s and 1980s, primarily as a professor at three American universities. He successfully fought attempts by the Reagan administration, which refused to join economic sanctions against South Africa, to deport him.

Brutus was the leading plaintiff in a suit filed against 34 American firms that sold arms and other equipment that made apartheid oppression possible. Using the Alien Tort Act of 1796 the suit requests $400 billion in reparations for those South Africans and their families who were killed, tortured, wounded, or dispossessed by security forces. On October 12, 2007, the Second Circuit Court ruled against the companies and the case will now be decided in the Supreme Court.

In 2007 Brutus declined to be inducted into the South African Sports Hall of Fame, because, as he stated: "It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims. It’s time—indeed long past time—for sports truth, apologies and reconciliation." Brutus is alluding to the incredible healing achieved between apartheid’s perpetrators and victims by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Archbishop Tutu.

While dying of prostate cancer Brutus still had the strength to speak out about the dangers of climate change and how it would affect poor countries much more than the rich. In a December 10th letter to delegates at the Copenhagen conference, Brutus warned against "brokering a deal that allows the corporations and the oil giants to continue to abuse the earth.”

As a final tribute to Dennis Brutus, Professor Bond, author of Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation, has this to say: “The memory of Dennis Brutus will remain everywhere there is struggle against injustice. Uniquely courageous, consistent and principled, Brutus bridged the global and local, politics and culture, class and race, the old and the young, the red and green.”

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. Columns from his 6-week trip to Southern Africa can be read at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/Africa.htm

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.