In July 1966, Brutus left South Africa for Britain on a one-way permit.In 1966, he joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the United Kingdom. Upon his release, he was placed under house arrest and banned from publishing. Brutus’s cell was next to Nelson Mandela’s on the Island. Some of his sentence was spent on Robben Island where he was assaulted, probably because of South Africa’s exclusion from the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. The Transvaal Indian Congress plotted to rescue him from hospital in a coffin but they were unsuccessful.In 1963 he was arrested after legally entering Mozambique on his way to petition a meeting of the International Olympic.īrutus went to trial, the magistrate rejected a supposed link with communism, but Brutus received 18 months hard labour for breaking his ban. He lay bleeding on the pavement for 30 minutes before an ambulance for the correct race group arrived. He tried to escape from the police in central Johannesburg, but a policeman shot him in the back. With a (then) Southern Rhodesia passport and a Mozambican visa, the Portuguese security police arrested him en route to Lourenco Marques (now Maputo). Brutus broke his banning orders by attending the 1963 Baden-Baden meeting of the International Olympic Committee. In late 1961 he was banned from teaching, writing, speaking in public and attending social or political meetings under the Suppression of Communism Act.In 1962, he helped set up the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), which spearheaded the international sports boycott against apartheid South Africa.

In July 1961 he take part in the Malmesbury Convention,an attempt to forge unity among coloured political groupings and closer cooperation with africans.In 1950 he became a supporter of the Non- European Unity Movement (NEUM) and also drew closer to the African National Congress (ANC) in exile and later to the South African Communist Party (SACP) As Secretary of the South African Sports Association, he was instrumental in stopping a proposed tour by the West Indies cricket team led by Frank Worrell in 1958. An ardent cricket and table tennis player in his youth, he was also a founder member of the South African Sports Association, an alternative to the White sports bodies of the time.

His studies in law at the University of Witwatersrand were cut short by his imprisonment.His parents were teachers.Brutus did news reporting and was an organiser with the Teachers’ League and the Congress Movement. He graduated from the University of Fort Hare with distinction in English in 1948. Dennis Brutus was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) on 28 November in 1924.His parents moved to Port Elizabeth where he grew up,at the age of four he attended Paterson High School.

Brutus history