Author: Evan Mwangi
Date: May 7, 2006
Type of article: Lifestyle Magazine
Source: The Daily Nation - only available online by registration and paid subscription fee

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Title: Poetry and Protest
Author: Dennis Brutus (edited by Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim)  
Publisher: Haymarket Books, Chicago, USA
Year: 2006
Available: Online at www.haymarketbooks.org
Reviewed by  EVAN MWANGI

Renowned South African poet Dennis Brutus has recognised Kenyan writers’ struggle for social justice in a new book in which he betrays more closeness to Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o than to other African literary giants. Brutus, who was imprisoned on Robben Island along with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, has also revealed to Lifestyle that he will be visiting Kenya early next year during the World Social Forum to be held in Nairobi in January. 

Known in Kenya for his eloquent opposition to the apartheid regime through his poetry, Brutus has aligned himself with the World Social Forum and has become a voice for social justice and humanity since the collapse of the apartheid regime. Although highly respected in Kenyan activist and academic circles, Brutus is not likely to be a darling of the Kenyan government or the younger group of writers. 

A great rival of the capitalist World Economic Forum, World Social Forum in which Brutus is a key participant is an annual event that brings together over 300,000 delegates from social and civil society movements from all over the world. The World Social Forum platform has emerged as a strong counterweight to global big capital which is seen to be against the welfare of humanity. Previous forums have been attended by famous intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. 

Brutus has taught in elite American universities, among them Dartmouth and Northwestern. These rich and privately owned institutions are located in affluent suburbs, but during his stay there Brutus preferred working with minorities in less plush areas of the cities. Currently a professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, Brutus is a controversial figure on the panel of judges who recently found American president George Bush guilty of crimes against humanity. He claims he wouldn’t pay the American government taxes unless it refunds the portion of his money that it spends on the war in Iraq.

One would think that as a high-profile poet in the league of Wole Soyinka, Brutus will have lined up for him a courtesy call to State House when he visits Nairobi. But if the American White House receives materials from him using a long pair of tongs from behind its walls to avoid possibilities of any contact with the dissident bard, the Kenyan State House officials won’t touch Brutus with a 10-foot pole unless they don’t remember who he is or unless they are ready to be constantly chided by the octogenarian poet for abetting what he thinks is a programmatic recolonisation of Africa by the West via sycophantic African governments. 

Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader brings together essays, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and poems written during Brutus’s 50-year writing career. Born in 1924 in Zimbabwe of South African parents, Brutus started writing poetry in high school. He attended Fort Hare and the University of Witwatersrand and taught for 14 years in South African high schools. He graduated with a BA in 1947 and married May Jaggars with whom he had eight children. Since the late 1950s, he became openly anti-government, and his campaigns against apartheid led to his being banned from all political and social activity in 1961.

In 1963, he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to 18 months of hard labour after being shot in the back while trying to escape. He spent time breaking stones with Nelson Mandela, and it is in prison that he wrote Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, a favourite collection of poetry among Kenyans familiar with his writing. 

In his poems, some of which were smuggled out of prison as letters to his brother’s wife, Martha (immortalised in the 1968 collection Letters to Martha, another Kenyans’ favourite), Brutus combines the radical and the traditional to address the South African situation. Some of the verse is overtly political and would be seen in some circles as political sloganeering. Exiled in 1966, he fought constantly for the freedom of South Africans under apartheid and for other oppressed people throughout the world.

The ban on his work was lifted in 1990 at a time readers were more interested in the emerging "Rainbow Nation" as opposed to the trials and tribulations in the fight for freedom. The activist in Brutus did not rest with the death of apartheid, which he sees to have emerged in more brutal forms. The 81-year-old poet has concentrated his energies in combating globalisation on the podium, between the lines of his poetry, and in street protests across the world. He is not against globalisation per se, but he is opposed to what he sees as inequalities sponsored by donor communities, especially the World Bank, IMF, and Western governments. Brutus’s undying passion for justice has been praised by Nadine Gordimer as "the real face of globalisation."

Poetry and Protest contains familiar verse (such as Stubborn Hopes) alongside newly composed works that Brutus scholars will love to examine to appreciate the trajectory of his writing since the collapse of apartheid. His new poetry is direct in its attack on profiteering among corporations and it exposes the inequalities within developed nations.
 
The poem "Prose Poem: Visiting My Father’s Birthplace" is nostalgic of the pastoral peace in rural South Africa now destroyed by mining activities and industrialisation. Evoking the sirens in Brutus’s earlier poems about apartheid, the persona reveals continuity between apartheid South Africa and the post-apartheid dispensation. He suggests that while nature wants to retain its enchanting beauty, global corporatism has intensified exploitative practices in the new era. 

In the essays, Brutus sees the major cause of the collapse of nation state in Africa not as ethnic rivalries but global power play. Under criticism from Brutus is Chinua Achebe’s view of the "Nigerian conflict in terms of tribal rivalries" and Wole Soyinka’s contention that the conflict was caused by "a collapse of humanity, of human beings behaving in some atavistic fashion".

Criticising Achebe’s and Soyinka’s formulation, Brutus blames Western powers for political and economic crises in Africa. Any failure to take into account the rivalries, the economic rivalries of the multinational corporations, of the oil interests, of Western powers, causes one to end up with a superficial interpretation, he says, listing Ngugi among the writers who have seen through the manipulation of political and economic power by the West for strategic reasons. 

He doesn’t take sides between Achebe’s and Ngugi’s disagreements on whether to use English or indigenous languages as the medium of literature in Africa. When I am asked to take sides between Achebe and Ngugi, I say I am on the side of both, he writes. But I can see how the colonial language has enormous influence in sharpening the colonial mentality. That is why Ngugi’s great book is called Decolonising the Mind. Because if you have enslaved the mind, you don’t really need chains after that.

Brutus says he sympathises with people who are opposed to colonial language, but he does not condemn those who use European languages, particularly considering the circumstances in which the languages were imposed on the colonised people. However, he is opposed to writers like V.S. Naipaul who have adopted not only the colonial language but also a "colonial mindset." He cites a 1979 interview in which Naipaul is asked what he thought about the future of Africa, and the Caribbean writer (best known in Kenya for his Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas) answered: "Africa has no future."

In other essays in the book, Brutus laments the glee with which Western critics cite Naipaul’s work, especially those sections in which the writer scorns Africa, India, Islam, and South America.