1987 Commencement Speech

Abstract

I am pleased to introduce our commencement speaker, Dennis Brutus, poet, scholar, educator, and courageous proponent of social justice. Born in what is today Harare, Zimbabwe, he was educated at Fort Hare University College, and Witwatersrand University in South Africa. Because of his continual outspoken challenges to apartheid, he has lived since 1966 in forced exile in Britain and the United States, where he has written and taught, and participated in the national liberation struggles of the peoples of Southern Africa. In his poetry, Mr. Brutus has denounced the subjugation of his countrymen, expressed the pain of imprisonment and exile, and sung his love for his wife and his homeland. His writings earned him the Mbari Award for poetry in Africa in 1963, the Freedom Writers Award in 1975, and the Langston Hughes Award in 1987. Since 1970 he has taught English Afro-American and African literatures, Creative Writing, and Political Science at the University of Denver, at Northwestern University, the University of Texas, Amherst College, and Dartmouth College. Last year he held the Cornell chair at Swarthmore College, and is currently at the University of Pittsburgh where he serves as Chairman of the department of Black Community Education, Research, and Development. An avid sportsman, Mr. Brutus was founding secretary of the South African Sports Association in 1958, President of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee in 1963, and Chairman of the International Campaign Against Racism in Sport in 1971, and head of the advisory board of A.R.E.N.A, A-R-E-N-A, the Institute of Sport and Social Issues in 1972. He is a person most widely credited with having South Africa excluded from the Olympics on grounds that its team was not representative of its population. The author of numerous articles on the writer’s social mission, expression of the anglophone literary canon in South African literature, Mr. Brutus’s most important influence on North American academic life was his founding in 1975 of the African Literature Association. Mr. Brutus’s activities in the support of democracy and human rights in South Africa have been acknowledged by the legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the city councils of Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, by trans-Africa and by the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. An outspoken advocate for full divestment from South Africa, Mr. Brutus is deeply involved in one of the most hotly debated issues on college campuses today. Kalamazoo College has examined divestment at length in recent years, and we have not reached consensus that divestment is an effective means to end apartheid, which we all abhor. We look forward to Mr. Brutus’s thoughts on the ongoing struggles for human rights that will mark the world into which the class of 1987 graduates. Mr. Dennis Brutus.