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Johannes A. Smit
4 The Human Rights Struggle: Perspectives from South
Africa
Very closely related to his sentiments in ‘Sports Test for South Africa’
(1959), and Brutus’s related organising and activism for international human
rights recognition, at least three developments in his thinking while still in
South Africa, could be identified in his oeuvre, viz. his critical reflection on
the so-called ‘gagging clause of the Sabotage Act – the General Law
Amendment Act (No 76 of 1962) – in his ‘Silent Poets, Strangled Writers’
(1963); his critical problematisation of ‘Negritude’ in ‘Negritude, Literature
and Nationalism: A Word from South Africa’ (1962); and his recognition in
prison in his autobiographical notes in ‘”You’ve come to Hell Island”: A
political prisoner under apartheid’, of how the apartheid system produce
criminals (1974).
4.1 In his reflections on the ‘gagging clause’ of the Sabotage Act – the
General Law Amendment Act (No 76 of 1962) – Brutus ([1963] 2006) uses
the reference to being human more than in any other of his published
documents – nine times in fact. Vis-à-vis the ‘civilised world’ Brutus accuses
the racist supremacist regime about its inhumanity by not giving people the
freedom to ‘speak and write’ (!) against its inhumanity.
In 1962, a fresh barbarism was perpetrated in South Africa.
While the civilized world has repeatedly been shocked by revelations
of the inhumanities committed here in the name of racial supremacy,
the ‘Gagging Clause’ of the Sabotage Act should move all humans to
the profoundest disgust. It is a disgust which must find expression in
action.
What does the Gagging Clause mean? And what can be done
about it?
The General Laws Amendment Act—to give the Sabotage
Act its official name—was aimed at those who seem in ANY WAY
to change a state of society intolerable to the majority and portending
destruction to all. A special clause in the Act enabled the Minister of
Justice to gag those who might speak or write against the system of
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