Dennis Vincent Brutus (28 November 1924 – 26 December 2009) was a South African activist, educator, journalist and poet best known for his campaign to have South Africa banned from the Olympic Games due to its racial policy of apartheid. Life and work Born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1924 to South African parents, Brutus was of indigenous Khoi, Dutch, French, English, German and Malaysian ancestry. His parents moved back home to Port Elizabeth when he was aged four, and young Brutus was classified under South Africa's apartheid racial code as "coloured". Brutus was a graduate of the University of Fort Hare (BA, 1946) and of the University of the Witwatersrand, where he studied law. He taught English and Afrikaans at several high schools in South Africa after 1948, but was eventually dismissed for his vocal criticism of apartheid. He served on the faculty of the University of Denver, Northwestern University and University of Pittsburgh, and was a Professor Emeritus from the last institution. In 2008, Brutus was awarded the Lifetime Honorary Award by the South African Department of Arts and Culture for his lifelong dedication to African and world poetry and literary arts. Activist Brutus was an activist against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. He learned politics in the Trotskyist movement of the Eastern Cape. Although not an accomplished athlete in his own right, he was motivated by the unfairness of selections for athletic teams. He joined the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department organisation (Anti-CAD), a Trotskyist group that organised against the Coloured Affairs Department, which was an attempt by the government to institutionalise divisions between blacks and coloureds. In 1958, he formed the South African Sports Association, and as Secretary was strongly opposed to a proposed cricket tour by Frank Worrell’s West Indies to South Africa in 1959, leading a successful campaign to have it cancelled. In 1962 Brutus was a co-founder of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), an organisation that would be heavily influential in the banning of apartheid-era South Africa from the Olympics in 1964. In 1961, Brutus was banned for his political activities as part of SANROC. As South Africa attempted, in 1968, to get back into the Olympics by arguing that they would field multi-racial teams, SANROC successfully pointed out that those teams were chosen on a segregated basis, leading to South Africa's continued ban from 1968 until