Tuesday, September 23 7:30 pm
PERFORMANCE
Dennis Brutus is Marx in Soweto
In the tradition of Howard Zinn's Marx in Soho, Dennis Brutus presents Marx in the light of the contradictions in post-Apartheid South Africa. This performance will act as a corrective to South Africa's Prime Minister's Thabo Mbeki's talk at the United Nations General Assembly.
Dennis Brutus was an activist against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1960s. He worked to get South Africa suspended from the Olympics; this eventually led to the country's expulsion from the games in 1970. He joined the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department organisation (Anti-CAD), a group that organized against the Coloured Affairs Department which was an attempt by the government to institutionalise divisions between blacks and coloureds. He was arrested in 1963 and jailed for 18 months on Robben Island.
In exile, he was professor of Africana studies at Northwestern and Pittsburgh, and an internationally-renowned speaker on social justice issues. He is also probably the most read and cited poet from Africa, and author of Poetry and Protest (Haymarket Books, 2006) and many other works of poetry. In 2005 he joined the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society as an honorary professor.
Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15 Free for Brecht Forum Subscribers