Dennis Brutus (1924–2009): An appreciation

Abstract

The death of Dennis Brutus sees the passing of South Africa's most internationally renowned poet since Roy Campbell. There may be no other point of comparison between the two men, and their international renown probably says more about international readers and the business of poetry publishing than it does about the quality of their work or the qualities of their character, but it points to one of the biggest ironies about Brutus's life and career : that this most intensely South African poet felt that he had not really got the respect he deserved in his own country. Although it seems fitting that after his long exile he will be buried in the land that he loved, even at his death he was at political odds too with the national regime whose policies he viewed as complicit with a global economic system that replicated apartheid injustice on an international scale.