The Passing of Two Giants of the Pan-African Struggle... Dennis Brutus And Bill Sutherland

[Toyin Falola]

 

From: "Kassahun Checole" <awp...@verizon.net>
To: <awp...@verzion.net>
Subject: The Passing of Two Giants of the Pan-African Struggle...
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:12:16 -0500

Dear Friends:

 

As you may have already heard, the end of the first decade of the 21st century brought about the demise of two stalwarts of the struggle for African freedom and justice.  The emminent poet and anti-aparthied fighter, Dennis Brutus passed on December 26, 2009, and Bill Sutherland, advocate for peace and Pan-African freedom fighter made his journey on January 2. Dennis was 85 years old and Bill 93.

 

In as much as our lives were enriched by their enormous energy and forthright leadership in the struggle, we will all miss their presence among us, but both Dennis and Bill leave a very rich legacy that has to be cherished and shared with the new generations of fighters for peace, justice and equaility.

 

It is important that we keep the faith, and acknowledge the fact that our future as African people, indeed all humanity, owes immense and examplary debt to the likes of Dennis Brutus and Bill Sutherland, whose courage and steadfastness has and continues to make a difference!!

 

Please find attached their obituaries that can be freely distributed.

 
Dennis Vincent Brutus, 1924-2009

World-renowned political organizer and one of Africa's most celebrated
poets, Dennis Brutus, died early on December 26 in Cape Town, in his
sleep, aged 85.

Even in his last days, Brutus was fully engaged, advocating social
protest against those responsible for climate change, and promoting
reparations to black South Africans from corporations that benefited
from apartheid. He was a leading plaintiff in the Alien Tort Claims Act
case against major firms that is now making progress in the US court system.

Brutus was born in Harare in 1924, but his South African parents soon
moved to Port Elizabeth where he attended Paterson and Schauderville
High Schools. He entered Fort Hare University on a full scholarship in
1940, graduating with a distinction in English and a second major in
Psychology. Further studies in law at the University of the
Witwatersrand were cut short by imprisonment for anti-apartheid activism.

Brutus' political activity initially included extensive journalistic
reporting, organising with the Teachers' League and Congress movement,
and leading the new South African Sports Association as an alternative
to white sports bodies. After his banning in 1961 under the Suppression
of Communism Act, he fled to Mozambique but was captured and deported to
Johannesburg. There, in 1963, Brutus was shot in the back while
attempting to escape police custody. Memorably, it was in front of Anglo
American Corporation headquarters that he nearly died while awaiting an
ambulance reserved for blacks.

While recovering, he was held in the Johannesburg Fort Prison cell which
more than a half-century earlier housed Mahatma Gandhi. Brutus was
transferred to Robben Island where he was jailed in the cell next to
Nelson Mandela, and in 1964-65 wrote the collections Sirens Knuckles
Boots and Letters to Martha, two of the richest poetic expressions of
political incarceration.

Subsequently forced into exile, Brutus resumed simultaneous careers as a
poet and anti-apartheid campaigner in London, and while working for the
International Defense and Aid Fund, was instrumental in achieving the
apartheid regime's expulsion from the 1968 Mexican Olympics and then in
1970 from the Olympic movement.

Upon moving to the US in 1977, Brutus served as a professor of
literature and African studies at Northwestern (Chicago) and Pittsburgh,
and defeated high-profile efforts by the Reagan Administration to deport
him during the early 1980s. He wrote numerous poems, ninety of which
will be published posthumously next year by Worcester State University,

and he helped organize major African writers organizations with his
colleagues Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.

Following the political transition in South Africa, Brutus resumed
activities with grassroots social movements in his home country. In the
late 1990s he also became a pivotal figure in the global justice
movement and a featured speaker each year at the World Social Forum, as
well as at protests against the World Trade Organisation, G8, Bretton
Woods Institutions and the New Partnership for Africa's Development.

Brutus continued to serve in the anti-racism, reparations and economic
justice movements as a leading strategist until his death, calling in
August for the 'Seattling' of the recent Copenhagen summit because
sufficient greenhouse gas emissions cuts and North-South 'climate debt'
payments were not on the agenda.

His final academic appointment was as Honorary Professor at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, and for that
university's press and Haymarket Press, he published the
autobiographical Poetry and Protest in 2006.

Amongst numerous recent accolades were the US War Resisters League peace
award in September, two Doctor of Literature degrees conferred at Rhodes
and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in April - following six
other honorary doctorates - and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the
South African government Department of Arts and Culture in 2008.

Brutus was also awarded membership in the South African Sports Hall of
Fame in 2007, but rejected it on grounds that the institution had not
confronted the country's racist history. He also won the Paul Robeson
and Langston Hughes awards.

The memory of Dennis Brutus will remain everywhere there is struggle
against injustice. Uniquely courageous, consistent and principled,
Brutus bridged the global and local, politics and culture, class and
race, the old and the young, the red and green. He was an emblem of
solidarity with all those peoples oppressed and environments wrecked by
the power of capital and state elites - hence some in the African
National Congress government labeled him 'ultraleft'. But given his role
as a world-class poet, Brutus showed that social justice advocates can
have both bread and roses.

Brutus's poetry collections are:
* Sirens Knuckles and Boots (Mbari Productions, Ibaden, Nigeria and
Northwestern University Press, Evanston Illinois, 1963).
* Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison
(Heinemann, Oxford, 1968).
* Poems from Algiers (African and Afro-American Studies and Research
Institute, Austin, Texas, 1970).
* A Simple Lust (Heinemann, Oxford, 1973).
* China Poems (African and Afro-American Studies and Research Centre,
Austin, Texas, 1975).
* Strains (Troubador Press, Del Valle, Texas).
* Stubborn Hope (Three Continents Press, Washington, DC and Heinemann,
Oxford, 1978).
* Salutes and Censures (Fourth Dimension, Enugu, Nigeria, 1982).
* Airs and Tributes (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey, 1989).
* Still the Sirens (Pennywhistle Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1993).
* Remembering Soweto, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, Camden,
New Jersey, 2004).
* Leafdrift, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, Camden, New Jersey,
2005).
* Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader, ed. Aisha Kareem and Lee
Sustar (Haymarket Books, Chicago and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press,
Pietermaritzburg, 2006).

He is survived by his wife May, his sisters Helen and Dolly, eight
children, nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren in Hong Kong,
England, the USA and Cape Town.

(By Patrick Bond)

Bill Sutherland Passes On

Papa Bill left us in the evening of Saturday, 2nd January 2010. We were always aware of his many dear friends from all over the world who were brought into the fold of our family. So 'condolences to you and condolences to us,' as we say in Ghana. Arrangements for memorial activities in celebration of his life will be announced later in the year.

In Solidarity,
Esi, Ralph, and Amowi

For more information about the memorials, or to send a note to the family, please contact:

Amowi Sutherland Phillips, <alana...@comcast.net>
or Matt Meyer, <mmm...@igc.org>.


Bill Sutherland, Pan African Pacifist, 1918-2010

Bill Sutherland, unofficial ambassador between the peoples of Africa and the Americas for over fifty years, died peacefully on the evening of January 2, 2010. He was 91.

A life-long pacifist and liberation advocate, Sutherland became involved in civil rights and anti-war activities as a youthful member of the Student Christian Movement in the 1930s. Sutherland was raised in New Jersey, the son of a prominent dentist and youngest brother to Reiter Sutherland and to Muriel Sutherland Snowden of Boston, who founded Freedom House in 1949 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant. He spent four years at Lewisburg Federal Correctional Facility in the 1940s as a conscientious objector to World War Two, striking up what became life-long friendships with fellow C.O.s Ralph DiGia, Bayard Rustin, George Houser, Dave Dellinger, and others. In 1951, in the early days of the Cold War, Sutherland, DiGia, Dellinger, and Quaker pacifist Art Emory constituted the Peacemaker bicycle project, which took the message of nuclear disarmament to both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In 1953, in coordination with the War Resisters International and with several activist groups and independence movement parties on the continent, he moved to what was then known as the Gold Coast. An active supporter of Kwame Nkrumah, he married playwright and Pan African cultural activist Efua Theodora, and became the headmaster of a rural secondary school. The call of Pan Africanist politics was very strong, and Sutherland was instrumental-along with a small group of African Americans living in Ghana at the time, including dentists Robert and Sara Lee-in hosting the visit of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King to the 1957 independence celebrations. In the early days of the first Ghanaian government, Sutherland also served on the organizing team of the All African Peoples Congress. He was appointed private secretary to Finance Minister Komla Gbedema. He was also central to the development of the Sahara Protest Team, which brought together African, European, and U.S. peace leaders to put their bodies in the way of nuclear testing in the Sahara Desert.

Sutherland left Ghana in 1961, working in both Lebanon and Israel for the founding of Peace Brigades International, and for the Israeli labor organization Histadrut. It was also in this period that he began a friendship with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan of the Ismaili community, working in support of displaced persons as Sadruddin became United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He settled in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1963, as a civil servant. Sutherland's chief work in Dar involved support for the burgeoning independent governments and liberation movements. A close friend and associate of Tanzania's Julius Nyerere and Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, Sutherland helped develop the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA). He served as hospitality officer for the Sixth Pan African Congress-held in Dar in 1974-working with C.L.R. James and other long-time colleagues to bridge the gap between Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora. He hosted countless individuals and delegations from the U.S. in these years, including assisting Malcolm X in what would be his last trip to Tanzania. His home in Dar became a camping ground for liberation leaders in exile from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and throughout the region. His love of music, especially jazz, his passion for tennis (which he played well into his 80s), and the pleasure he got from dancing, were hallmarks of his interactions, shared with political associates and personal friends the world over.
 
Despite Sutherland's close association with those engaged in armed struggle, he maintained his connections with and commitment to revolutionary nonviolence, and joined the international staff of the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in 1974. As the AFSC pushed for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to South African anti-apartheid clergyman Bishop Desmond Tutu, Sutherland was working as the AFSC international representative. In 2003, the AFSC initiated an annual Bill Sutherland Institute, training Africa lobbyists and advocates in various policy issues and educational techniques. Sutherland was also the recipient of an honorary doctorate degree from Bates College, and served as a Fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics. He was awarded a special citation from the Gandhi Peace Foundation in India, and, in 2009, received the War Resisters League's Grace Paley Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2000, Africa World Press published Sutherland's Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle, and Liberation, co-authored by Matt Meyer. Archbishop Tutu, who wrote the foreword for the book, commented that "Sutherland and Meyer have looked beyond the short-term strategies and tactics which too often divide progressive people . . . They have begun to develop a language which looks at the roots of our humanness." On the occasion of Sutherland's 90th birthday last year, Tutu called in a special message, noting that "the people of Africa owe Bill Sutherland a big thank you for his tireless support."

Bill Sutherland is survived by three children-Esi Sutherland-Addy, Ralph Sutherland, and Amowi Sutherland Phillips-as well as grandchildren in Accra, Ghana; Spokane, Washington; Lewiston, Maine; New Haven, Connecticut; and Brooklyn, New York. In addition to scores of family members, friends, and loved ones, he will be missed by his niece, Gail Snowden, his loving partner Marilyn Meyer, and his "adopted" sons Matt Meyer and john powell. There will be a private funeral for family members this week, and memorial services will be organized for later this year.

Kassahun Checole, Publisher
Africa World Press, Inc. &
The Red Sea Press, Inc.
541 W. Ingham Avenue, Ste. B
Trenton, NJ 08638
(609) 695-3200 tel
(609) 695-6466 fax
www.africaworldpressbooks.com

-- 

---------------------------
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0220
USA
512 475 7224
512 475 7222  (fax)
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
 

[afrs...@aol.com]

AFRICAN RESPONSE TO THE HAITIAN DISASTROUS EARTHQUAKE

NEW YORK, NY - Jan. 14, 2009 - Africans throughout the world join with millions across the globe in expressing our condolences and unwavering friendship to the people of Haiti.  We are more than horrified at the devastation caused by the killer earthquake which has resulted in the estimated loss of the lives of more than 100,000 Haitians. 

This is a time for action - it is a time for Africans throughout the world to respond to this tragedy as the world has always responded to disasters in Africa.  Under the leadership of the Celebrate Africa Foundation, Africans can respond generously to the people of Haiti.  Arrangements have been made for Africans to contribute products needed to help the people of Haiti.  You can donate canned goods (non-perishable products), bottled water, tents, and shoes. 

Arrangements have been made for those wishing to donate these products to do so and take them to:

Harlem Quality Services
126 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10026
Phone: 212-222-7444
Manager: Mr. Abdoulaye Boye
Asst. Manager: Mr. Abdoulaye Thiam

On its part, the Board of Directors of the Celebrate Africa Foundation has approved a donation of $1,000 to the Haitian disaster relief.  Celebrate Africa Foundation is not accepting any funds for the Haitian relief.  We direct those wishing to make monetary contributions to President Obama's statement, asking you to contribute online to the Red Cross, or donate $10 to be charged to your cell phone bill by texting "HAITI" to "90999."  Or find more ways to help through the Center for International Disaster Information.

We urgently call on all Africans to act immediately.

 

Chika A. Onyeani
Chair/CEO
Celebrate Africa Foundation
44 East 32nd Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10016
Tel.: 917-279-4038

[Abdul Bangura]

This Is Great! But good folk, please be careful of the many vultures out there. They are preying on people's heightened emotions and generosity right now. Give only to organizations like the Guanin Center whose work some of you on this forum have supported over the years and you know has been  reaching the people that are usually neglected after such disasters. Even big organizations like the Red Cross are only there temporarily and will leave the real work to us after they have raked in the big donations and given temporary aid.

 

Centro Cultural Guanin Web Site:  http://www.guanin.org/

 

In Peace always,

Abdul Karim Bangura/.