Interracial Relationships that Changed History

Join PBS Black Culture Connection, PBS Learning Media and Listverse as we revisit groundbreaking relationships, cases and rulings that have made a mark on history!  Browse the profiles of influential couples around the world or visualize some of their stories through an infographic. 

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| Mildred and Richard Loving

On July 11, 1958, newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving were asleep in bed when three armed police officers burst into the room. The couple were hauled from their house and thrown into jail, where Mildred remained for several days, all for the crime of getting married.  At that time, 24 states across the country had laws strictly prohibiting marriage between people of different races. Five weeks earlier, the longtime couple had learned Mildred was pregnant and decided to wed in defiance of the law. In order to evade Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, the pair had traveled to Washington, D.C. for the ceremony. Upon their return to Virginia, they were arrested and found guilty, with the judge informing Mildred that “as long as you live you will be known as a felon.” The Lovings moved to the relative safety of Washington, but longed to return to their home state.

In 1963, they approached the American Civil Liberties Union to fight their case in court. After an extensive legal battle, the Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Although such laws officially remained on the books in several states, the Lovings’ landmark victory rendered them effectively unenforceable, ensuring nobody else would have to endure the same treatment. The last law officially prohibiting interracial marriage was repealed in Alabama in 2000.

Photo © Bettmann/CORBIS

| Ruth Williams Khama and Sir Seretse Khama

While attending law school in England, Ruth met Sir Seretse Khama (then Prince Seretse Khama), the chief of the Bamangwato tribe, who became Botswana's first president in 1966. Under his leadership, the country underwent significant economic and social progress, while Ruth was apolitically active and influential First Lady. But first they had to overcome the wave of bigotry brought about by their controversial marriage. When they announced the news in 1948,Ruth’s father threw her out of the house, while Seretse’s uncle declared “if he brings his white wife here, I will fight him to the death.” Bowing to pressure from apartheid South Africa, the British government attempted to stop the marriage and then prevented the couple from returning to Botswana.

For eight years they lived as exiles in England, until the Bamangwato sent a personal cable to the Queen in protest. Their sons Ian and Tshekedi later became significant political figures as well. The marriage is said to have inspired the film A Marriage of Inconvenience and the book Colour Bar.

Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

| Arcadio Huang and Marie-Claude Regnier  

In the early years of the 18th century, European scholars made huge advances in their understanding of Chinese language and culture. Much of this work rested on the efforts of a remarkable young man named Arcadio Huang. Born in a small town in China’s Fujian province, Huang’s Catholic parents were set on him becoming a priest. He was adopted by a French priest and later traveled to France with Bishop Artus de Lionne. In France, he soon joined with a number of promising young French scholars to develop a Chinese-French dictionary. 

In 1713, Huang married a middle-class Parisian woman named Marie-Claude Regnier. There are very few records of marriages between Europeans and non-Europeans during this time period and many considered such relationships unthinkable. Nevertheless, Marie-Claude’s parents reportedly gave their blessing for the union, and while the couple soon found themselves in financial difficulties, the marriage seems to have been a happy one. A year later, Marie-Claude died giving birth to their first child and Huang, heartbroken, followed her a year later. Historians have speculated that their unusual marriage was one of the first of its kind.

| Gonzalo Guerrero and Zazil Ha

Some of the first people of Spanish/ Mayan heritage were the product of a truly incredible marriage. As a survivor of a shipwreck off the Yucatan coast, Gonzalo Guerrero found himself  held captive by the Maya. Desperate to avoid being killed, he successfully sought to learn his captors’ language and customs. As he gained acceptance into the culture, he taught Spanish combat tactics to the Maya, which are said to have allowed them to drive out the conquistadors. Guerrero himself became a highly respected figure in Mayan society, marrying a princess named Zazil Ha and being given the temples of Ichpaatún, north of Chetumal.

When Hernan Cortez arrived in the area, an attempt was made to retrieve Guerrero and one other survivor. But Guerrero refused to leave, saying, “I am married and have three children, and they look on me as a cacique [“lord”] here, and captain in time of war. My face is tattooed and my ears are pierced. What would the Spaniards say if they saw me like this? Go, and God's blessing be with you.”

Photo: Statue of Gonzalo Guerrero guarding over his family.

| Louisa and Louis Gregory

Both Louis Gregory, an African American man and Louisa Mathews, a British woman were of the Bahá’í faith: a religion centered on unity. The two met in 1911 on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in Egypt. Their love for one another was not received well by the general public, especially in the United States, where racism was still very much the norm. In spite of the Bahá’í faith’s innermost message of “Oneness of Mankind,” many people of the faith living in Washington, D.C. adhered to the attitude of racial segregation that was rampant during the time.

With Bahá’í leader Abdu’l-Bahá declaring his staunch support for interracial marriages, Louis and Louisa were married in 1912 in New York, becoming the first interracial Bahá’í couple. Louis Gregory became a strong advocate for racial unity in both the United States as well as within the Bahá’í community; his most significant expression of the teachings of his faith come from his marriage. Despite countless obstacles, the couple remained married for almost 40 years, until Louis Gregory’s death in 1951.

Photo:Louis and Louisa Gregory

| Leonard Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones

The marriage and divorce trial of Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones brought the racial tensions of a nation to court, examining how a person is labeled as “colored” and “white” in legal terms. Rhinelander was a white socialite born into a prominent New York family. Jones was the biracial daughter of a working class couple. In 1921, the two met in Stamford, Connecticut at a clinic where Kip was working through his issues of anxiety and stuttering. The couple had a three-year love affair before marrying in 1924. Because of the Rhinelanders’ high position in society, their marriage was listed in the New York Social Register. Alice became the first black woman to appear in its pages, and the media swung into action.

Headlines immediately blared the news of the marriage. Kip’s family quickly followed this with a demand that he divorce his wife, and he eventually succumbed to their will. The divorce trial was centered on Kip’s claim that Jones had passed herself off as a white woman. Under the eyes of an all-white, all-male jury, the focus of the trial became whether Rhinelander must have reasonably known of Jones’s mixed heritage. In a move that can only be described as grossly demeaning, Jones was ordered to strip off her clothes so the jury could determine if she was to be considered “colored.” They ruled in Jones’s favor, and the annulment was denied. Kip's estate was ordered to pay a yearly allowance to Alice for the rest of her life. The two never reunited.

Photo © Bettmann/CORBIS

| James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa

James Kirkpatrick was a high-ranking diplomat from the East India Company who became captivated by Indo-Persian culture after traveling to India with imperialist intentions. He quickly gave up his English habits and wardrobe and replaced them with nautch parties and Mughal-style outfits. As he delved deeper and deeper into the culture, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam and in 1801 married Khair un-Nissa, the teenage granddaughter of the prime minister of Hyderabad. Local officials only allowed the marriage on the condition that he “strive for the best interests of the [Hyderabadi] government.” He accepted the conditions, and the marriage was done.

A public outrage quickly ensued in Calcutta because the marriage was interracial. As imperialism swept across India, the union became even more of a taboo, especially because Kirkpatrick was the highest-ranking official yet to be involved in this type of marriage. Upon hearing of the scandal, newly appointed governor of India Lord Rickard Wessesley summoned Kirkpatrick to Calcutta, where he was reprimanded and dismissed from his position. He went on to have two children with his wife. A few years later, Kirkpatrick decided his children should be sent to England to for schooling and to receive Christian names. They never returned to India. Tragically, James didn’t make it back to town to bid his children goodbye. Immediately after they left, he came down with a fever and died (around 1807). Khair un-Nissa would die of natural causes only a few years later.

| Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray

In spite of the increased acceptance of interracial marriage across the United States, Bill de Blasio, elected Mayor of New York in 2013, is the first white official to be elected into a major office with a black spouse by his side. McCray is expected to play a major role in de Blasio's administration.

While polls show that interracial marriages across the United States are increasingly accepted, some disapproval is still overt: A 2013 Cheerios ad featuring a biracial family sparked so many racist remarks on Youtube that comments had to be disabled.

Many celebrate the de Blasio marriage as another significant milestone and hope it will help combat the racism that still exists in a country constantly striving to uphold its cornerstone value of equality.

Photo © Janet Mayer/Splash News/Corbis

Ruth First, anti-apartheid activist

On the afternoon of August 17, 1982 Ruth First was killed when a letter bomb exploded as she was going through her mail in her office at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. She had been forced to leave South Africa in 1964 because of her political activism and after first going into exile in England she had taken up a post as Director of Research at the university in Maputo. In her book 117 Days (1965), Ruth First describes her experiences in solitary confinement in a South African jail. The book’s final sentence, in which she writes about her eventual release, was to prove horrifyingly prophetic: “When they left me in my own house at last, I was convinced that they would come again.” Indeed the security police did “come again”—this time in the form of a bomb secreted in an envelope stolen five years previously from the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Swaziland.

Ruth First was born on May 4, 1925 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had come to South Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century. Her father, Julius, a furniture manufacturer, had come to South Africa at the age of ten from Latvia and her mother, Tilly (née Levetan), had come from Lithuania when she was four years old. Both parents were left-wing activists and founder members of the Communist Party of South Africa, and Ruth and her brother grew up in an intensely political home. They were exposed to revolutionary politics at an early age: at the age of fourteen, Ruth was already a member of the Young Left Wing Book Club.

After matriculating from Jeppe High School for Girls, Johannesburg, Ruth attended the University of the Witwatersrand where she was very active in student politics. After graduation she worked briefly for the Johannesburg City Council and then started her career in journalism, becoming editor of the left-wing radical newspaper The Guardian. This newspaper was to change its name regularly over the next decade as increasingly repressive state actions banned the Communist Party (in 1950) and censored the media.

Ruth First was a prolific writer and her penetrating investigative journalism exposed many of the harsh conditions under which the majority of South Africans lived. After the advent to power in 1948 of the National Party, her courageous writing exposed the evils of apartheid that were reflected in every facet of life for black South Africans. Her work increasingly highlighted the struggle between labor and capital and the exploitative role played by the state in that struggle.

In 1949 Ruth First married Joe Slovo (1926–1995), a fellow communist and activist who had come from Lithuania to South Africa as a boy. They played a leading role in the increasingly radicalized protests of the 1950s when the Nationalist government set about dismantling and incapacitating any organization or person opposed to its policies. The Communist Party and the African National Congress (ANC) together with the African trade union movement were subjected to increasing harassment. On top of the list of political bogeys at that time was the Communist Party of South Africa that was banned in 1950 but operated underground.

The ANC, founded in 1912, began to adopt a more militant mass-based strategy in the 1950s and young leaders such as Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) and Walter Sisulu (1912–2003) advocated working in close co-operation with Indian, Colored and White organizations that were opposed to government policies. In 1953 Ruth First helped found the South African Congress of Democrats formed to work with the ANC in resisting the government, and she was on the drafting committee of the Freedom Charter that was presented at the Congress of People at Kliptown on June 25, 1955. Unfortunately a banning order prevented her from attending the gathering.

In December 1956 both Ruth First and her husband Joe Slovo were arrested and charged with high treason along with 154 other activists. The trial lasted four years, after which all 156 accused were acquitted. Following the State of Emergency declared after the Sharpeville shootings in March 1960 (where a peaceful protest against the Pass Laws had culminated in the shooting of sixty-nine people by the police), the ANC was banned and thousands of activists were arrested, including Joe Slovo. Ruth First fled to neighboring Swaziland with her children and returned to Johannesburg only after the emergency was lifted. After a secret trip in 1961 to South West Africa (now Namibia), a mandated territory given to South Africa after World War 1, Ruth First was banned and restricted to the magisterial district of Johannesburg for five years.

As various restrictions prevented her from continuing her work as a journalist Ruth First became more and more involved with the underground movement that was changing its tactics from protest to sabotage. On July 11, 1963, the Security Police raided Lilliesleaf Farm at Rivonia near Johannesburg, which had been purchased as a base for the underground movement. High ranking members of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the ANC) and the South African Communist Party were arrested. Neither Ruth nor Joe (who was on the High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe) was present at the time of the raid. In the trial that followed prominent ANC activists like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Although she was not put on trial time was running out for Ruth, and on August 9, 1963, the Security Police arrested her in the main hall of the Witwatersrand University library. She was detained in solitary confinement under South Africa’s draconian Ninety-Day Law under which any police officer was given the power to detain a suspect without a warrant and to hold the suspect for ninety days without access to a lawyer. On her release she was immediately re-arrested on the pavement outside the police station for another twenty-seven days, during which time she attempted suicide. It was clear that she could not continue living in South Africa and in March 1964 she left South Africa with her children on an exit permit to join her husband, who had already fled to England.

The family settled in North London and Ruth became intensely involved in anti-apartheid politics. The 1960s saw Ruth researching, editing and writing a number of books including 117 Days, which was made into a television film that exposed millions of people living in Britain to the horrors of apartheid. She was a prolific author, writing and editing books, pamphlets and articles on Africa and in particular on the destabilizing role South Africa was playing in the region. In 1973 Ruth was appointed a lecturer in sociology at Durham University, England and in 1977 professor and research director of the Center for African Studies at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. Here she worked with a team of Marxist academics to assist the new government of the recently liberated Portuguese colony to construct a new socialist order.

In the geo-political climate of the time the apartheid government of South Africa feared the close proximity to South Africa of the newly liberated Mozambique and the possibility of its being used as a base for attacks on South Africa. Ruth’s presence and her work posed a potential threat and, following the conclusion of a UNESCO conference at the center in 1982, Ruth was killed by a letter bomb sent by security agents in South Africa.

SELECTED WORKS BY RUTH FIRST

South West Africa. London: 1963; 117 Days. London: 1965; with Segal, R. South West Africa: A Travesty ofTrust. London: 1967; The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’etat in Africa. London: 1970; with Steele, J. and C. Gurney, eds. The South African Connection: Western Investment in Apartheid.London: 1972; Libya: The Elusive Revolution. London: 1975; Scott, Ann. Olive Schreiner. London: 1980; The Mozambican Miner: Proletarian and Peasant. New York: 1983.

Bibliography

Davenport, T. R. H. South Africa: A Modern History. London: 1977; Harlow, B. After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing. London: 1966; Marks, Shula. “Ruth First: A Tribute.” Journal of Southern African Studies 10 (1): October 1983: 123–128; Pinnock, Don. Voices of Liberation, vol. 2: Ruth First. Pretoria: 1997; Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. London: 1997; Verwey, E. J., ed. New Dictionary of South African Biography, vol 1. Pretoria: 1995; Williams, Gavin. “Ruth First’s Contribution to African Studies.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 14 (2) (1996): 197–220.

reprint: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/first-ruth

Still Fighting Apartheid – South African Activist Dennis Brutus

by Robert Looby Monday, August 1st, 2005

Denis Brutus, (28 November 1924 – 26 December 2009) born in 1924 in what was then British Rhodesia to South African parents, shot to prominence (and jail) in the 1960s campaigning for a boycott of South Africa in the sporting world. A veteran activist, poet and Professor of African Studies and African Literature, Brutus continues to campaign vigorously against economic injustice. His targets today are the corporations, banks and institutions that profit from what he terms a “global system of economic apartheid”. Robert Looby recently had the pleasure of discussing the past, present and future with Prof. Brutus

How did you get involved in the struggle for justice?

I grew up in a segregated area of course. I'm classified as a non-white or a coloured, so one is exposed to racial segregation very early, and remember this is the twenties and the thirties when I grew up. But I always make the point that within a community one is protected from the kind of harsh racism that one would experience outside that community. We were one of the early creations of what was called the segregation policy, which later became the apartheid policy of course, from 1948 onwards, when the apartheid government was elected. In the ’20s and the ’30s you had a kind of colonial racism not unlike what was happening in the south of the United States, where schools and churches were separated for black and white. In South Africa eventually they would have post offices with separate entrances for black and white or, as it was called, white and non-white. (Blacks were divided into fairly broad categories under the term ‘non-white’.) There were buses for whites only and buses for non-whites.

Above all that you need to internationalise the pressures… if they're globalising oppression, we are globalising resistance.

So I grow up in that context, but I'm not particularly aware of it because, as I say, one is sheltered. When I start going to school and later to high school and I have to travel through the city – then of course one becomes more aware of the signs that say ,whites only, or ,non-whites only’, although the language they used was ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’ so that amusingly people coming from America for instance thought that they ought to get into a non-white bus. They were not Europeans; they were Americans. It's one of those minor confusions.

Once I went to high school, one became more aware of the racial discrimination between white and non-white in the bus service and of course always the bad service was for the non-whites. I think it was actually at university that it really came home to me, although I'd been aware of it at high school. And it came to me in a peculiar way. I went to a black college called Fort Hare, which had been an old military outpost commanded by a colonel called Hare in the days of the colonial wars against the Africans. Then this fort was taken over by the churches as a kind of ecumenical enterprise and jointly they put up a college for non-whites – blacks actually – and it was named after Fort Hare. One of the things that struck me was that some of the best athletes in the country were at Fort Hare and they were performing better than any white athletes in that particular sport, but they were not allowed to be on the Olympic team because the government proudly announced that there would never be a black on the Olympic team.

It gets a little more complicated because according to the Olympics you ought to select on merit and not penalise people because of their race, so I became involved in opposing the policy of racism and apartheid essentially from a sports angle initially. Now amusingly, people have paid me the compliment of saying I was very smart to select sport as the area in which the apartheid system was vulnerable, but in fact I didn't tackle the system because I thought it was vulnerable at that point. I just thought it was plain unfair to keep athletes off the team because of their colour; so you can see how I eventually collide with the system and I'm banned and I'm arrested and put under house arrest and jailed and I escape and I get shot in the back in Johannesburg and I end up on Robben island with Nelson Mandela in the same section of the prison, breaking stones. But it really began with sport, and I feel I ought to say this. I don't want to get credit for something I don't deserve: being some very smart guy who took on apartheid via sport. That was not my approach. My approach was: I took on sport as racism and in the process found myself in conflict with the apartheid system …

What lessons are there to be learned from the defeat of apartheid?

Above all that you need to internationalise the pressures – and it helps to have specific targets. The springbok rugby team created one for us; Barclays Bank may offer us the same opportunity – they operate in more than 80 countries. When I was in Britain, together with Peter Hain, now a member of the Tony Blair government, I organised a very effective campaign all across Barclays banks and eventually, as you may know, we forced them to leave South Africa. They're now returning in spite of having been one of the big allies of apartheid so we are mobilising opposition to them. What is important about it is that Barclays operates in more than 80 countries all over the world. We're planning to organise protests in all 80 of those countries so if they're globalising oppression, we are globalising resistance.

I was in court earlier this month in Johannesburg opposing the takeover of the biggest retailing bank in South Africa, ABSA (Amalgamated Bank of South Africa – the bank with the widest services among the popular masses), by Barclays Bank. You must remember that Barclays was one of the banks that financed the apartheid system and lent it enormous sums even when the UN was condemning the system and calling for a boycott. The campaign is still on.

With the collapse of apartheid were you not tempted to retire from public life and leave others to carry on the struggle for justice?

I wish I could say yes, but unfortunately I went back to South Africa, largely at Mandela's invitation, at the time of his triumph in the elections. The ANC was unbanned and they had a celebration. And I realised that the ANC had made a deal with white power so that in fact corporations were still going to run the system. They were still going to own the gold and the banks and they were also going to run the Olympic committee. It was operated by whites even though the whole fight had been about trying to get a more representative structure. But the ANC, perhaps in its anxiety to get power – and many of them of course were compromisers secretly – undertook various negotiations. The ANC had in fact sent young men and women to train with the World Bank as interns, so clearly they were not interested so much in changing the system as changing who ran the system. When I realised that, I understood, really reluctantly, that the fight wasn't over and that I would simply have to keep going. When I got back they said to me at the airport: 'How does it feel to be back in a democracy now?' And I said 'Hold it, hold it. I don't think we've arrived in a democracy yet.' So I was unpopular of course because clearly I was saying things that people would rather I did not.

You were also in Edinburgh for the G8 meeting. What did you achieve there?

It is helpful to focus on current events. Edinburgh and the G8 Summit was a major advance for us and a major setback for our opponents. Blair's attempt to distract attention from the war in Iraq, the anger of the British people at his lies, and his pusillanimous following of the bushcowboy-rampaging – all failures; anger against the war and his conduct was, instead, intensified. And his hijacking of a major section of civil society, by lining up NGOs around white whatevers and claptrap about Making Poverty History also backfired; more people in Britain and the world understand better the essential cruelty and rapacity of a global economic system – global economic apartheid – which exploits and crushes millions around the world.

For us, I think, our greatest gains were in mobilising and organising radical voices on one of Britain's great historic occasions, and in turning around the pleas for pity and charity so that they became strident demands for social justice. Political awareness, in Britain and around the world, benefited greatly. Our thanks to all those who organised so well and so generously.

The larger fight, of course, continues. And so in Africa we are still struggling to beat back the imperialist designs of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), just as the people of the Americas are fighting CAFTA as their contribution to our global struggle. Overall, I believe we are steadily making advances.

The Bonos and the Geldofs confuse the issue for many, who then believe the problems can be solved by charity. For a contrary opinion, seeMonbiot. They failed to persuade many at the G8, so we can keep going. We may even have gained momentum, since many more now have a better understanding of the problem.

George Monbiot has spoken to us about the &ldquoconditionalities” attached to debt relief programmes.

The tricky thing is that conditionalities vary from country to country. Countries that are given loans generally have three conditionalities imposed on them. Many others, but principally three. One: they are forced to accept an SAP, or Structural Adjustment Programme, which requires the countries to change the whole structure of their economies. They have to put the focus on export, producing for export and going to export markets. That means several things. One is of course that when you are producing corn for export, you don't have corn for local consumption. You literally are starving the people at home by aiming at getting to the market. Point two is that you're at the mercy of the market and you often have to sell at the market price, which really is a price that does not give you a very good return on your economy, but the fact that you are producing goods for export, not for local consumption, is more serious. Why do they insist on that? There are many reasons but I'll give you just one. When loans are given to developing countries by the western countries, they are given in dollars and must be repaid in dollars. This means that you have to earn dollars and the way you earn dollars is by going to the export market and getting foreign currency. That's one of the conditionalities.

Another one, much more serious in my view, although they're all serious, is that the World Bank and the other external banks become what are called &ldquopriority creditors” and this means that you have to repay them or at least pay a service on the debt. But because they're a priority creditor social services at home – whether schools, hospitals, water, housing, roads, infrastructure – all have to wait until you have paid your debt or your service on the debt. This means a tremendous burden on the people because they are not getting the services they should and the money that comes in as taxation goes out as service on the debt. Social services are therefore desperately neglected all over what we call the global south – countries in Africa and Asia and South America, who are all victims of this burden of debt. By the latest count it is about 180 countries and the total debt is in the region of – if you use English figures – 2,000 billion1. So the second one is this loss of social services because your money is going on the repayment of debt.

The third conditionality varies from country to country but is probably the worst: in order to qualify for debt forgiveness or even partial debt forgiveness or some kind of phoney debt forgiveness where they lend you the money to pay them what you owe, incurring a new debt in place of the old one, i.e. to become what is called a HIPC, or Highly Indebted Poor Country, you have to make a firm and binding commitment that you will take orders from the World Bank and the IMF. If you don't, you are guilty of what is called &ldquobad governance” as opposed to &ldquogood governance” so you virtually sign a death warrant. This is a new form of enslavement and has been correctly so described by the African Council of Churches and others. By making that binding commitment to obey the orders, prescriptions and conditionalities of the World Bank and the IMF, you are virtually being recolonised, being re-enslaved by the chains of debt.

How are you maintaining the pressure?

Increased education is what keeps us going – and growing; this is how, eventually we won the South Africa fight. Now we have better resources, but more powerful forces against us, such as consumerism, which distracts the young we might recruit. But we keep growing – in South Africa, but also in South America.

We're really going after not only all the banks, but the World Bank and the IMF. So it's a very broad picture. In that picture, what we specifically do with Barclays is really up to my campaign and the strategies developed. Let me give you the three current strategies. One strategy is to demand an apology from Barclays for its guilt in financing the apartheid system. We want a public apology for that. Point two: we want reparations to be paid to the victims of apartheid. There are many still who have never received any assistance from the government in spite of the fact that there was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as you remember. There were recommendations that certain sums of money should be given to the victims of apartheid and they've never got those monies. Point three is a rather complicated one. We have filed a law suit in the New York Supreme Court naming 23 corporations and demanding reparations from them. Barclays is one of the 23, so we're saying Barclays should not enter South Africa – although the government has okayed it – until the lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court is resolved.

Right now I'm quite excited about three projects for which we’re not getting any support, though that doesn't deter me. We'll probably get them done eventually. One is we're trying to have a conference in the US in which we will combine Africans and African Americans on the issue of reparations. They're both campaigning on the issue of reparations but they campaign separately. We’re trying to pool them together so for me that's quite a demanding project because it would involve hundreds of people if we can pull it off. And two: we’re planning an action in South Africa where the victims of apartheid will confront the minister in the parliament building itself. There'll be a march on parliament and a demand that the government take action to deliver on reparations and that too will take some time. Also, I've a new book coming out, early next year. I've just had one come out, a collection of poetry called Leaf Drift. It's a kind of mixture – just leaves, drifting together. So I'm kept busy. I turned 80 last year and I might turn 81 this year if I last long enough. There's enough to keep me busy.

Notes

1 A figure of $2.5 trillion is given by George Monbiot in his The Age of

Consent (2003) after Romilly Greenhill and Ann Pettifor, The United States

as an HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Country) – how the Poor are Financing the

Rich

More about Dennis Brutus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Brutus

reference: http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/still-fighting-apartheid-south-african-activist-dennis-brutus/1/

Published collections

• Sirens Knuckles and Boots (Mbari Productions, 1963).
• Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (Heinemann, 1968).
• Poems from Algiers (African and Afro-American Studies and Research Institute, 1970).
• A Simple Lust (Heinemann, 1973).
• China Poems (African and Afro-American studies and Research Centre, 1975).
• Stubborn Hope (Three Continents Press/Heinemann, 1978).
• Salutes and Censures (Fourth Dimension, 1982).
• Airs & Tributes (Whirlwind Press, 1989).
• Still the Sirens (Pennywhistle Press, 1993).
• Remembering Soweto, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, 2004).
• Leafdrift, ed. Lamont B. Steptoe (Whirlwind Press, 2005).
• Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Haymarket Books, 2006).

Nadine Gordimer, South African author, dies at 90

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South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer has died in Johannesburg aged 90.

The writer, who was one of the literary world's most powerful voices against apartheid - died at her home after a short illness, her family said.

She wrote more than 30 books, including the novels My Son's Story, Burger's Daughter and July's People.

She jointly won 1974's Booker Prize for The Conservationist and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991.

'She cared most deeply'

The Nobel committee said at the time it was honouring Gordimer for her "magnificent epic writing" which had been "of very great benefit to humanity".

The daughter of a Lithuanian Jewish watchmaker, she began writing from an early age. Gordimer published her first story - Come Again Tomorrow - in a Johannesburg magazine at just 15.

Her works comprised both novels and short stories where the consequences of apartheid, exile and alienation were the major themes.

Nadine Gordimer and Nelson Mandela were close friends

Gordimer's family said she "cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realise its new democracy".

Committed to fighting apartheid, the author was a leading member of the African National Congress (ANC) and fought for the release of Nelson Mandela.

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Nadine Gordimer was interviewed by the BBC in 2011

They went on to become firm friends and she edited Mandela's famous I Am Prepared To Die speech, which he gave as a defendant during his 1962 trial.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation paid tribute to Gordimer, saying it was "deeply saddened at the loss of South Africa's grande dame of literature".

"We have lost a great writer, a patriot and strong voice for equality and democracy in the world," it added.

A number of Gordimer's books were banned by the South African government under the apartheid regime including 1966's The Late Bourgeois World and 1979's Burger's Daughter.

Her last novel, No Time Like the Present, published in 2012, follows veterans of the battle against apartheid as they deal with the issues facing modern South Africa.

Despite her hatred of apartheid, the author was proud of her heritage and said she only considered emigrating once - to nearby Zambia.

"Then I discovered the truth, which was that in Zambia I was regarded by black friends as a European, a stranger," she said.

"It is only here that I can be what I am: a white African."

The author featured on the 1981 BBC series Writers And Places, narrated by authors about places which are important in their work and lives. Gordimer's film focussed on Johannesburg

In her later years, Gordimer became a vocal campaigner in the HIV/Aids movement, lobbying and fund-raising on behalf of the Treatment Action Campaign, a group pushing for the South African Government to provide free, life-saving drugs to sufferers.

She was also critical of South African President Jacob Zuma, expressing her opposition to a proposed law which would limit the publication of information deemed sensitive by the government.

"The reintroduction of censorship is unthinkable when you think how people suffered to get rid of censorship in all its forms," she said in an interview last month.

The ANC said it sent its "heartfelt condolences" to Gordimer's family.

"Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life's work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity," it said.

Paying tribute on Twitter, Canadian author and fellow Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood said: "Very sorry to hear that Nadine Gordimer has died. One of the greats, and a fearless spokesperson for human rights."

Gordimer's family said a private memorial service would be announced at a later date.

She is survived by two children.

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