[1] Born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1924[2] to South African parents, Brutus was of indigenous Khoi, Dutch, French, English, German and Malay 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".

He taught English and Afrikaans at several high schools in South Africa after 1948, but was eventually dismissed for his vocal criticism of apartheid.

The book received the Mbari Poetry Prize, awarded to a black poet of distinction, but Brutus turned it down on the grounds of its racial exclusivity.

[8] After he was released, in 1965, Brutus left South Africa on an exit permit, which meant he could never return home while the apartheid regime stayed in power.

In 1967, Brutus came to the United States under the auspices of the ACOA on a speaking tour, where he acquainted Americans more closely with the present situation in South Africa, informed American sports organisations about the segregated conditions that South African athletes must endure, and raised money to support the ACOA's Africa Defense and Aid Fund to support the defence of those charged under the apartheid laws.

Jackie Robinson, the first African-American athlete to break the colour barrier in major league baseball, published a statement calling for continued suspension of South Africa from the Olympic Games.

[17] When his British passport was cancelled in the wake of Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, he was threatened with deportation, and he fought a protracted and highly publicized legal battle until 1983, when he was granted asylum in the United States.

At the induction ceremony, he publicly turned down his nomination, stating: It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims.

[24] According to fellow writer Olu Oguibe, interim Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, "Brutus was arguably Africa's greatest and most influential modern poet after Leopold Sedar Senghor and Christopher Okigbo, certainly the most widely-read, and no doubt among the world's finest poets of all time.