South African Poet Calls for Divestiture

only I speak of others' woe:

those congealed in concrete

or rotting in rusted ghetto-shacks

only I speak their wordless woe,

their unarticulated simple lust. --Dennis Brutus   "A Simple Lust," 1971

Twelve years after he was released from a South African prison and exiled from his country. Dennis Brutus, one of South Africa's leading poets, said last week his poems still reflect the same themes they did when he was at home, themes based on the struggle against apartheid.

Brutus, who spoke Thursday in the Science Center at a conference on southern Africa, and Saturday addressed a gathering of black Harvard alumni, cannot return to South Africa because of his anti-apartheid activities.

In addition to his poetry, Brutus was banned, jailed and finally exiled because he led the struggle to keep South Africa's all-white teams out of the Olympics. Most recently, he organized the demonstrations against South Africa's participation in the Davis Cup tournaments at Vanderbilt University.

Brutus, who holds a tenured position in Northwestern's English department, said he believes the situation in South Africa is getting increasingly serious because of the accelerating tempo at which the white-minority government is arming itself and is becoming economically self-sufficient.

In addition, he said, Prime Minister John Vorster is speeding up the rate at which the Bantustan--the 13 per cent of the land area which has been designated as the black majority's share of the country--are being given independence, so that soon "it will be impossible to unscramble this scrambled mess," Brutus said.

Brutus stressed the need for corporate withdrawal because, he said, the companies cannot take meaningful action for social change without contravening South African law. "The last thing Nelson Mandella [long-time leader of the older South African liberation party] said to me--we used to break stones together in prison--was 'get the message out; get the corporations off our backs.'"

However, Brutus was optimistic about the current effots to organize resistance in South Africa. The Black Consciousness movement has mobilized a great deal of unified support, and even if the South African government continues to jail and kill black leaders, others will emerge, he said.

Demonstrations in the United States and in other countries are important to people in South Africa, Brutus said, because "it gives them new courage for the struggle."

"The decisive pressure will come from inside South Africa, but whatever we can do on the outside, we should be prepared to do," he added.

Brutus said there have been several major guerrilla clashes on the border of South Africa in the last six months, but that the Western press has not heard about them because South African laws make it illegal for citizens to mention such events.

Brutus, whose son Anthony Brutus is a junior here, was labelled "colored" in South Africa, but he said, "We don't let those labels bother us; they are just another device to divide and rule." Suggestions that South Africa's blacks are so divided tribally that they could not rule their country are also misleading, he added, because over 50 per cent of the black population lives in cities, and the old tribal structures broke down many years ago