Anti-apartheid, political and sports activist, poet and professor Dennis Brutus died in his sleep in Cape Town over the weekend, his family confirmed on Sunday.

Sapa reports that Brutus’ son Anthony said his father passed away on Saturday at the age of 85. Brutus had suffered from prostate cancer for little over a year.

Anthony Brutus said he remembered his father’s acceptance of others most. “He always spoke well of others. He wasn’t critical,” he said. 
”Contact with young people kept him mentally and physically fit.
 “After a protest they would grab a bite to eat and he bought everyone a burger and ice cream. He combined caring and enjoying with his activism,” Anthony said.

“He wanted to be as long as possible part of the movement to stand up to the establishment of corporations and government.”

According to Anthony Brutus, poverty, racism and xenophobia were not part of the society that his father went to prison for during apartheid.
 Referring to the society that Brutus had envisioned for South Africa, Anthony said: “I don’t think he believed that we’ve come close to achieving that.”

Born in then-Rhodesia in 1924, Dennis Brutus grew up in Port Elizabeth. He was educated at Fort Hare University and started studies in law at the University of the Witwatersrand which were cut short by his imprisonment.

Brutus did extensive journalistic reporting, organised with the Teachers’ League and Congress movement, and founded the South African Sports Association as an alternative to white sports bodies.

He was banned from teaching, writing, speaking in public or attending social or political meetings in 1961 under the Suppression of Communism Act.
 He then fled to Mozambique but was apprehended and deported to Johannesburg. Brutus was imprisoned in the cell next to Nelson Mandela on Robben Island from 1963 to 1965 for violating the ban.
 After his release, Brutus went into exile in London.

Through his activism, South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968.
 South Africa was subsequently banned from the Olympic Movement in 1970.

He publicly rejected induction into the South African Sports Hall of Fame in 2007, famously saying at the awards ceremony: “It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims. It’s time — indeed long past time — for sports truth, apologies and reconciliation.”