Around the World: South Africa

Poet dead at 85

South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus, who fought apartheid in words and deeds and remained an activist well after the fall of his country's racist system, has died. He was 85.

Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. Born in 1924 in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Brutus was the son of South African teachers who moved back to their native country when he was still a boy. His books Sirens, Knuckles, Boots and Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison were published while he was in jail. His poems were political, but also emotional and highly personal.