I first met Dennis Brutus in Los Angeles in March of 1967. I was a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) then, and Dennis was on his first major speaking tour in the United States, having made his way into exile in England after gaining release from prison and house arrest in South Africa just a year earlier. In Britain he had become active in a number of London-based anti-apartheid organizations, and if I remember correctly, it was his involvement in the campaign to exclude South Africa from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that occasioned his visit to North America. He was traveling as President of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC), an organization he had founded in South Africa, and he was making his rounds to strategic points in the Western Hemisphere in an effort to marshal support for an international boycott of South African sports teams.

In those days Dennis was better known as a political activist than as a poet. After all, up to that point he had published only one slim volume of poems, Sirens Knuckles Boots, which had been issued in 1963 by the Mbari Club in Nigeria and consequently was not widely available in the rest of the Englishspeaking world. However, his second volume, Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison, was about to appear in Heinemann's ubiquitous African Writers Series the following year, and this, more than any other single publication, was to make him more conspicuous to the reading public.