Month: January 2010

Alarmingly Close in Gaza

By NADIA HIJAB

During a visit to Ramallah a year ago while the Israeli bombardment of Gaza was underway, I shared my fears with a close Palestinian friend. “It may sound insane, but I think the Israelis’ real objective is to see them all dead.”

My friend told me not to be silly, the assault was horrific, but it was not mass killing. I said that wasn’t the issue: This was a population already very vulnerable to disease, ill-health, and malnutrition after years of siege, with its infrastructure rotted, its water and food contaminated. Israel’s war would surely push the people over the brink, especially if the siege was maintained — as it has been.

In other words, Israel would not directly kill tens of thousands of Palestinians, but it would create the conditions for tens of thousands to die. Any epidemic could finish the job. My friend fell silent at these words, but still shook his head in disbelief.

Two things have changed since last year: More people have started to apply the term “genocide” to what Israel is doing to Gaza. And not only is Israel being directly accused but also, increasingly, Egypt.

Is it genocide? “The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” — a clear, concise document adopted by the United Nations in December 1948 — states that genocide is any of five acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Three acts appear to apply to the situation in Gaza: “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Legal scholars disagree about how to interpret the Convention’s articles and it has proven difficult, over the years, to define crimes as genocide, let alone to prevent or end them. In line with the Bosnia precedent — the only authoritative legal treatment of genocide to date — it would be necessary to establish deliberate intent for an accusation of genocide against Israel to stand up in court.

Israel’s leadership has not, of course, issued a declaration of intent. However, many leading Israeli officials can be said to have done so. For example:

• Putting the Palestinians of Gaza “on a diet” — Dov Weisglass, chief aide to Ariel Sharon, in 2006.

• Exposing them to “a bigger shoah (holocaust)” — Matan Vilnai, former deputy defense minister, in 2008.

• Issuing religious edits exhorting soldiers to show no mercy — the Israeli army rabbinate during the actual conflict.

Such declarations echo at least three of the “8 stages of genocide” identified by Genocide Watch president Gregory Stanton in the 1990s after the Rwanda genocide: Classification, dehumanization, and polarization.

Then there is the deliberate destruction or barring of means of sustenance as Israel has done on land and at sea. Already, the Goldstone Report has said that depriving the Gaza Palestinians of their means of sustenance, employment, housing and water, freedom of movement, and access to a court of law, could amount to persecution.

Since the December-January assault, there have been many authoritative reports by human rights and environmental organizations on the impact of the war and the ongoing siege on the people, soil, air, and water, including the increase in cancers, deformed births, and preventable deaths. The death toll in Gaza from swine flu reached nine in mid-December and 13 a week later — an epidemic in waiting.

CP for more

By Uri Avnery

Something odd, almost bizarre, is going on in Egypt these days.

About 1400 activists from all over the world gathered there on their way to the Gaza Strip. On the anniversary of the “Cast Lead” War, they intended to participate in a non-violent demonstration against the ongoing blockade, which makes the life of 1.5 million inhabitants of the Strip intolerable.

At the same time, protest demonstrations were to take place in many countries. In Tel-Aviv, too, a big protest was planned. The “monitoring committee” of the Arab citizens of Israel was to organize an event on the Gaza border.

When the international activists arrived in Egypt, a surprise awaited them. The Egyptian government forbade their trip to Gaza. Their buses were held up at the outskirts of Cairo and turned back. Individual protesters who succeeded in reaching the Sinai in regular buses were taken off them. The Egyptian security forces conducted a regular hunt for the activists.

The angry activists besieged their embassies in Cairo. On the street in front of the French embassy, a tent camp sprang up which was soon surrounded by the Egyptian police. American protesters gathered in front of their embassy and demanded to see the ambassador. Several protesters who are over 70 years old started a hunger strike. Everywhere, the protesters were held up by Egyptian elite units in full riot gear, while red water cannon trucks were lurking in the background. Protesters who tried to assemble in Cairo’s central Tahrir (liberation) Square were mishandled.

In the end, after a meeting with the wife of the president, a typical Egyptian solution was found: one hundred activists were allowed to reach Gaza. The rest remained in Cairo, bewildered and frustrated.

WHILE THE demonstrators were cooling their heels in the Egyptian capital and trying to find ways to vent their anger, Binyamin Netanyahu was received in the president’s palace in the heart of the city. His hosts went to great lengths to laud and celebrate his contribution to peace, especially the “freeze” of settlement activity in the West Bank, a phony gesture that does not include East Jerusalem.

Hosni Mubarak and Netanyahu have met in the past – but not in Cairo. The Egyptian president always insisted that the meetings take place in Sharm-al-Sheikh, as far from the Egyptian population centers as possible. The invitation to Cairo was, therefore, a significant token of increasingly close relations.

As a special gift for Netanyahu, Mubarak agreed to allow hundreds of Israelis to come to Egypt and pray at the grave of Rabbi Yaakov Abu-Hatzeira, who died and was buried in the Egyptian town of Damanhur 130 years ago, on his way from Morocco to the Holy Land.

There is something symbolic about this: the blocking of the pro-Palestinian protesters on their way to Gaza at the same time as the invitation of Israelis to Damanhur.

ONE MAY well wonder about the Egyptian participation in the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The blockade started long before the Gaza War and has turned the Strip into what has been described as “the biggest prison on earth”. The blockade applies to everything except essential medicines and the most basic foodstuffs. US senator John Kerry, former candidate for the presidency, was shocked to hear that the blockade included pasta – the Israeli army in its wisdom has designated noodles as a luxury. The blockade is all-embracing – from building materials to school children’s copy books. Except for the most extreme humanitarian cases, nobody can pass from the Gaza Strip to Israel or the West Bank, nor the other way round.

But Israel controls only three sides of the Strip. The Northern and Eastern borders are blocked by the Israeli army, the Western border by the Israeli navy. The fourth border, the Southern one, is controlled by Egypt. Therefore, the entire blockade would be ineffective without Egyptian participation.

Ostensibly, this does not make sense. Egypt considers itself as the leader of the Arab world. It is the most populous Arab country, situated at the center of the Arab world. Fifty years ago the president of Egypt, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, was the idol of all the Arabs, especially of the Palestinians. How can Egypt collaborate with the “Zionist enemy”, as Egyptians called Israel then, in bringing 1.5 million brother Arabs to their knees?

Until recently, the Egyptian government had been sticking to a solution that exemplifies the 6000-year old Egyptian political acumen. It participated in the blockade but closed its eyes to the hundreds of tunnels dug under the Egyptian-Gaza border, through which the daily supplies for the population were flowing (for exorbitant prices, and with high profits for Egyptian merchants), together with the stream of arms. People also passed through them – from Hamas activists to brides.

This is about to change. Egypt has started building an iron wall – literally – along the full length of the Gaza border, consisting of steel pillars thrust deep into the ground, in order to block all tunnels. That will finally choke the inhabitants.

When the most extreme Zionist, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, wrote 80 years ago about erecting an “Iron Wall” against the Palestinians, he did not dream of Arabs doing just that.

WHY DO they do it?

ZM for more

By Melissa Britz

A major American financial services company, TIAA-CREF, has divested from four Asian energy companies doing business with the Sudanese government due to concerns about human rights violations in the country.

The move comes after failed talks with the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) of Delhi, an Indian public sector enterprise, and three Chinese companies, PetroChina Co Ltd, CNPC Hong Kong and Sinopec, about their Sudanese operations, according to a TIAA-CREF statement issued in New York on Monday.

“Our decision to sell shares in these companies culminated a three-year effort to encourage them to end their ties to Sudan or attempt to end suffering there,” said Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., TIAA-CREF’s chief executive.

However, TIAFF-CREF is retaining investments in a Malaysian government-owned company, PETRONAS. Ferguson said the company “has acknowledged our concerns and engaged in dialogue about how it might address them.”

American activists have campaigned in recent years for a number of major U.S. investment companies to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. The Save Darfur Coalition alleges that up to 70 percent of the country’s oil revenue is channeled to the military forces responsible for human rights violations in Darfur.

Conflict in Darfur led to the International Criminal Court (ICC) charging Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashi with war crimes and crimes against humanity in March 2009. According to the ICC’s website “this is the first ever warrant of arrest ever issued for a sitting Head of State by the ICC.”

An ICC statement attributes the charges to “crimes (that) were allegedly committed during a five-year counter-insurgency campaign by the Government of Sudan against the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and other armed groups opposing the Government of Sudan in Darfur.”

TIAA-CREF features on Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 top U.S. public- and privately-held corporations and specialises in providing financial services to non-profit organisations such as hospitals and universities.

AA for more

By R. Taggart Murphy

Introduction

Out in the academic cemetery to which avatars of market fundamentalism thought they had consigned their intellectual and political opponents, one can hear today the unmistakable scrape of coffin lids opening. And climbing out of their graves are the bodies of those who contend that the reductionist assumptions of neo-classical/ rational choice orthodoxy are not simply inadequate but flawed in the most fundamental sense.

The reason may seem obvious: the financial catastrophe of last year and the failure of so many established thinkers to see it coming. But there is more dogging the luminaries of mainstream finance and economics than the simple inability to have read the tea leaves properly – to their blindness, for example, in the face of the rise in U.S. housing prices to the point they no longer bore any relation to the earnings streams of much of the American population or to the fantastic assumptions about default rates built into the business models of too many Wall Street houses. To be sure, a few non-mainstream analysts did get these things right before the fact — Nouriel Roubini, for example, or Michael Lewis. But it was in the way the crisis took the entire policy establishment by surprise that we see signs of broader, systemic conceptual failure. Policy makers in Washington, London, Frankfurt and Basel were, after all, advised by intellectuals and analysts privy to the most supposedly up-to-date thinking about markets, about finance, about economic reality. That they could get things so very, very wrong points to deliberate, self-induced myopia over the complexity of and interrelationships among economic and political realities – a myopia that surely contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

So the world suddenly seems more receptive to those who contend that economic life is not all about interchangeably autonomous “actors” maximizing their utility, but that institutions matter, that culture matters, that history and place matter – and above all that power matters. Signs of this are everywhere. Frightened politicians have been reaching for the old Keynesian tool chest in their efforts to stave off economic meltdown. John Kenneth Galbraith with his notions of the “notoriously short memories of financial markets” and the overweening pricing power of large corporations is acquiring a new patina of respectability. Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Anthony Trollope’s novels are being dusted off for offering better insight into the rapacious behavior of Wall Street than back issues of the Journal of Finance. And here and there in “respectable” publications, one even encounters the visage of Karl Marx: intellectual grandfather of the suspect discipline of sociology, proponent of dialectical materialism and the class struggle, and prophet of the demise of a capitalism hoisted on the petard of its own contradictions.

Veblen (left) and Marx

Thus for writers and analysts on the left, the recent economic events hold out the tantalizing promise of an end to the marginalization they have endured since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But for all their understandable schadenfreude at the sudden advent of an era in which it is scarcely possible to keep a straight face while uttering the words “efficient markets hypothesis” – not to mention “Washington Consensus” – does Marxist scholarship actually have anything to say that illuminates our present predicament? It is one thing to invoke Keynesian fears of liquidity traps at a time when it is obvious that waves of credit creation by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan are barely moving the real economy of production and trade. Or to concede that regulators had become captives of those they were charged with regulating and that all the complex, formula-driven instruments that were supposed to diversify risk had done exactly the opposite. Or even to acknowledge that financial markets are more akin to herds of cattle driven alternately by greed and fear than the smoothly humming, risk-distribution machines of modern finance theory; that they can and regularly will overshoot with catastrophic consequences for the real economy – and that governments need proactive and deliberately intrusive oversight to head that off.

JF for more

The very basis of the health care reform bill is, at its core, unconstitutional. If this mandate is allowed to stand, it sets a dangerous precedent for the U.S. government to require us to purchase other products and services from whatever industries it chooses to support. What’s next? Will the government pass a law forcing us to buy pharmaceuticals at thousands of dollars a year? Will it force us to purchase U.S.-made automobiles in order to boost the automobile industry? Is our economic free choice now centrally planned by our own government operating like Communist China? This is a serious question that Constitutional scholars will no doubt be debating in the months ahead. But who am I kidding anyway? The U.S. government has long since abandoned the U.S. Constitution and no has any intention of abiding by it. Want proof? Read just one amendment: the 10th amendment. Check out the website www.TenthAmendmentCenter.com which carries a highly relevant article on this matter: Health Care Nullification and Interposition (http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com…). It paraphrases James Madison, saying, “…state governments not only have the right to resist unconstitutional federal acts, but that, in order to protect liberty, they are ‘duty bound to interpose’ or stand between the federal government and the people of the state.” – Mike Adams

by Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) Even if Obama’s health care reform bill becomes law, mandating that all Americans buy health insurance policies for a failed system of “sick care”, I will refuse to comply. I’ve read the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and nowhere in that document do I find that the federal government has the power to force consumers to purchase for-profit insurance products from private companies.

The very basis of the health care reform bill is, at its core, unconstitutional. If this mandate is allowed to stand, it sets a dangerous precedent for the U.S. government to require us to purchase other products and services from whatever industries it chooses to support. What’s next? Will the government pass a law forcing us to buy pharmaceuticals at thousands of dollars a year? Will it force us to purchase U.S.-made automobiles in order to boost the automobile industry? Is our economic free choice now centrally planned by our own government operating like Communist China?

This is a serious question that Constitutional scholars will no doubt be debating in the months ahead. But who am I kidding anyway? The U.S. government has long since abandoned the U.S. Constitution and no has any intention of abiding by it. Want proof? Read just one amendment: the 10th amendment.

Check out the website www.TenthAmendmentCenter.com which carries a highly relevant article on this matter: Health Care Nullification and Interposition (http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com…). It paraphrases James Madison, saying, “…state governments not only have the right to resist unconstitutional federal acts, but that, in order to protect liberty, they are ‘duty bound to interpose’ or stand between the federal government and the people of the state.”

Our right to choose has been stolen away

In addition to the very serious legal problems with government-mandated private health insurance, this health care reform law strips away my right to choose what type of medicine I wish to be treated with. I don’t find any credibility in the drugs-and-surgery approach to health care. The pharmaceutical industry is riddled with scientific fraud, quackery, corruption and criminal behavior — much of it documented right here on NaturalNews.com. Its drugs are approved by a corrupt, dishonest regulatory agency (the FDA) that has abandoned science in its quest to push more drugs onto the people. Why should I, as a “free” American, be forced to pay money to a system that I know to be largely based on fraud?

If I had a choice, I would prefer to buy into a system of naturopathic care, where doctors respect the healing ability of the human body and try to work with the patient instead of assaulting him with chemicals and surgeries. But Obama’s health care reform bill gives me no such choice. I cannot choose to direct my money into a system of medicine that I trust and respect. Instead, I am being forced to pay money into a system that is morally corrupt and scientifically fraudulent. It is a system that will only bring more harm and suffering to the people while enhancing the profits of the greed-driven corporations behind this medical scam.

I find it highly offensive that my own government would threaten me with a financial penalty if I refuse to pay money to such a racket. It’s much like being forced to pay a “protection fee” to the mob. With this health care reform decision, our government has now become the enforcement branch of the Big Pharma crime ring, using the powers of the IRS (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washin…) to intimidate people into handing over their money to a gang of dishonest corporations that have found a whole new way to take Americans for a ride.

With this bill, all Americans are essentially being held up at gunpoint. We’re being mugged on the streets by our own government, and they’re demanding not only our money (to the tune of over $15,000 a year for a typical family) but also our lives — because conventional health care may very well cost you your life!

Breaking Americans down, one family at a time

The whole thing is pure highway robbery, sanctioned by the government. The arrogant Congressmen and Senators who passed this law are, themselves, guilty of robbing the American people blind in order to redirect money into the pockets of some of the wealthiest corporations in the world: the drug companies. Has anyone bothered to answer the simple question that if tens of millions of Americans can’t afford health insurance now, how are they supposed to afford to pay the fine for not buying any?

Forcing people to buy something they already cannot afford is a truly idiotic idea. It’s like passing a law that tries to solve the homeless problem by making it against the law to not buy a house. The reason they’re homeless is because they can’t afford a house in the first place!

Similarly, the reason people don’t have health insurance right now is because they cannot afford to buy any. How does forcing people to buy what they cannot afford solve anything?

This is why I’m now convinced that the whole point of the health care reform bill is to destroy American families. It was designed from the start, I believe, to drive more families into bankruptcy and government dependence. It’s all part of a package of new initiatives that appear to be created specifically for the purpose of destroying America through debt and disease.

You can reach no other conclusion, really, if you think about it. When you start to realize about what our nation is doing with its fiat currency, how the U.S. government has to rent debt from the private corporation known as the Federal Reserve, and how the drug companies are bankrupting cities, states and federal programs, you really have to question the motives of a new law that would further worsen both the debt and health problems now tearing our country apart.

Why would members of Congress pass a health care “reform” bill that offered no reform and no health? Why would the Obama administration be engaged in under-the-table, behind-closed-doors deals with the drug companies just to make sure they continue to be able to charge monopoly prices for their dangerous medications? Why would the IRS now be invoked to enforce this medical racket? The answer can only be that somewhere at the top of government, someone is diligently working to destroy America. There’s no faster way to accomplish that goal than to keep people diseased and indebted, and this new health care reform racket accomplishes both of those goals quite nicely.

That’s why I simply refuse to pay into such a system. For me to spend money supporting such a racket goes against every moral fiber in my conscious existence. I would no sooner pay money to this racket than I would donate dollars to murderers or rapists. Every dollar that goes into this system only perpetuates the crimes against humanity currently being committed by the pharmaceutical industry — especially against our nation’s children.

I guess the IRS is just going to have to issue me a fine. If so, I’ll pay it under protest, but I’d rather pay a fine to the IRS than hand over my money to the corrupt, failed system of western medicine that pretends to offer “health care” in America today.

The collapse of an empire isn’t pretty

I’ll have the last laugh, of course, because this whole charade will come tumbling down soon enough. We are watching the last days of the Roman Empire reflected in America now. The closer any empire gets toward collapse, the more insane its legislative initiatives become. Sheer desperation drives its legislators to enact outrageously ill-conceived laws that would normally never even be considered. Such is the nature of the last desperate gasps of a crumbling empire — an empire that has now turned to looting its own citizens as a last-ditch effort to keep itself afloat.

Of course, every collapsing empire does much the same. The looting of the citizenry is, in fact, one of the more important signs that a collapse is imminent. It has happened repeatedly throughout history, and it usually involves a looting of the treasury and an abandonment (or hyperinflation) of the currency. Punitive taxation of the population — or a mandate requiring people to part with their money — is nothing new.

WPA for more

“Noam Chomsky delivers the 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture: The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism at Columbia University School for International Affairs for the Heyman Center for the Humanities. After paying homage to Edward Said’s stressing imperialism as central to our culture Chomsky builds his case with telling quotes of American leaders rationalizing and denying extermination of Native Americans on through US terrorism in Latin and South America, like in Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, and the Middle East.”

Hi Ingrid,
Happy New Year!
In the hope of providing an antidote to the shameful propaganda and scaremongering that is currently dominating the media (following the failed Christmas plane bombing, and the would-be bomber’s alleged connections to a Yemen-based al-Qaeda group, which includes a former Guantanamo prisoner), I’ve just updated my definitive Guantanamo prisoner list (first published last March), which provides information and links about all 779 prisoners: I hope that it’s useful not only as a historical document, but also as reference for the cases of the 198 men still held, as those of us opposed to indefinite detention without charge or trial maintain our struggle to close Guantanamo, and to see those still held either charged or released.
Please feel free to cross-post/circulate/publicize.
Best,
Andy

Back in March, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, as “the culmination of a three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” Now updated (as my ongoing project nears its four-year mark), the four parts of the list are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

As I explained at the time, the first fruit of my research was my book The Guantánamo Files, in which, based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources), I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these men (and boys), and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.

The list provided references to the chapters in The Guantánamo Files where the prisoners’ stories can be found, and also provided numerous links to the hundreds of articles that I wrote between May 2007 and March 2009, for a variety of publications, expanding on and updating the stories of all 779 prisoners. In particular, I covered the stories of the 143 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 onwards in unprecedented depth, and also covered the stories of the 27 prisoners charged in Guantánamo’s Military Commission trial system in more detail than was available from most, if not all other sources.

In addition, the list also included links to the 12 online chapters, published between November 2007 and February 2009, in which I told the stories of over 250 prisoners that I was unable to include in the book (either because they were not available at the time of writing, or to keep the book at a manageable length).

As a result — and notwithstanding the fact that the New York Times had made a list of documents relating to each prisoner available online — I believe that I was justified in stating that the list was “the most comprehensive list ever published of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo,” providing details of the 533 prisoners released at that point (and the dates of their release), and the 241 prisoners who were still held (including the 59 prisoners who had been cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration), for the same reason that my book provides what I have been told is an unparalleled introduction to Guantánamo and the stories of the men held there: because it provides a much-needed context for these stories that is difficult to discern in the Pentagon’s documents without detailed analysis.

When I first published the list in March, I promised — perhaps rather rashly — that I would update the list as more prisoners were released, a task that proved easier to promise than to accomplish. As a result, this update to the four parts of the list draws on the 290 or so articles that I have published in the last ten months, tracking the Obama administration’s stumbling progress towards closing the prison, reporting the stories of the 41 prisoners released since March, and covering other aspects of the Guantánamo story; in particular, the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions in the US courts, in which, since March, nine prisoners have had their habeas corpus petitions granted by the US courts, and six have had their petitions refused (the total, to date, is 32 victories for the prisoners, and just nine for the government). Overall, as it stood at December 31, 2009, 574 prisoners had been released from Guantánamo (42 under Obama), one — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — had been transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial, six had died, and 198 remained, including one man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in 2008.

Andy Worthington for more

by Joyce Nyairo

Nairobi — The death of Dennis Brutus compels us to think fondly of the first generation of modern African poets. Modern, because they wrote rather than chanted in the way many generations of ethnic griots, court poets and orators had done before the arrival of colonialism and literacy.

I first encountered Dennis Vincent Brutus in 1976 when I recited his poem “Today in Prison” at the Kenya Music Festival. Before I could master the poem’s mood and tone I had to look up the meaning of the word “tacit” which sits so innocently in the middle of the second line, but which carries all of the poem’s emotions.

Over the years, I grew to recognise that there was nothing tacit or unstated about Brutus’ poetry or his actions. Indeed, one should never be deceived by the defeat, the implied acceptance that is suggested in the lines “Somehow we survive severance, deprivation, loss” from one of his early poems.

Brutus’ poetry stands at the peak of Africa’s protest literature – a literature that, like him, has very often been written in the lonely precincts of harsh prisons.

Lyrical beauty

Like legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, Dennis Brutus combined poetry, sports and politics. True, much of Ali’s poetry is spoken rather than written, but like that of Brutus it has always amounted to a memorable lyrical beauty that compels people to listen and act; to take a stand against the politics of race.

As president of the South Africa Non-Racial Olympic Committee, Brutus campaigned for the expulsion of South Africa and then Rhodesia from the Olympic Games. The South African government of the day reacted to Brutus’ tireless crusades for racial justice by banning him from political and social activity and in 1963 he was arrested.

A police bullet fired into his fleeing back quickly halted his escape and he nearly died on the street, waiting for an ambulance that would carry a black. After he recovered he was jailed on Robben Island for 18 months. It was then that his first collection of poems, “Sirens, knuckles and boots”, was published in Nigeria by Mbari Productions.

The title of that collection signals Brutus’ trademark attention to soundtracks that define daily existence. Wailing sirens, crackling knuckles and stomping boots constituted some of the terrifying noises that enabled and defined apartheid’s oppression and unrelenting violation of personal freedom and space.

Along with Gabriel Okara and the early Wole Soyinka, Brutus is seen to belong to the transitional phase of African poetry – poets who were distinguished by their clear grasp of Africa’s physical and cultural landscape. Brutus’ poems often compare the continent’s socio-political woes with the figure of an alluring woman.

In “Nightsong: Country” the speaker clings to “soft curves …voluptuous – submissively primal” earth. Radical feminists might well protest at this subordination of the African woman but that might be a tunnel-vision reading of Brutus’ intentions, his sentimental but indestructible commitment to his country.

As early as the 1960s, Brutus’ poetry documented city landscapes – from shanties to skyscrapers – in ways that signalled his affirmation of a hybrid urban identity as a legitimate African heritage that nonetheless needed to be rescued from structural poverty and exclusion as he eloquently pronounces in “A simple lust”.

In “Nightsong: City” fear of violence dogs the “tunnel streets” and the lure of sleep at night places a thin veil on the people’s anger and tension. Travel and return are the other dominant themes in Brutus’s poetry. In “A troubadour, I traverse all my land” he mocks apartheid’s restrictions on movement, inquiry and cross-racial blending. This theme of travel also echoes the poet’s own life of exile and an undying desire to return to the motherland.

Brutus was born in 1924 in Salisbury (Harare) to South African parents. He studied at Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1966, Brutus fled to Britain, moving to the United States as a political refugee in 1971. He taught at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburg.

All Africa for more