Today in history: South African poet is born

Ingrid Jonker was born on 19 September 1933 on a farm in the rural area of Douglas, near Kimberley in the Northern Cape.

After her parents’ divorce, Jonker experienced a childhood of material deprivation and emotional setbacks. In her early adulthood she had a short, unhappy marriage.

She started writing poetry at the age of six and her first published poems appeared in her high school magazine.

Her first known collection of poems, Na die Somer (After the Summer) was compiled in 1946, when she was just 13.

By the time she was 16, she was corresponding with seasoned Afrikaans poets such as DJ Opperman and her work was published regularly in family magazines such as Die Huisgenoot.

Jonker’s work was also condemned by her father, a leading member of the National Party and the chairperson of the parliamentary committee responsible for the apartheid system of censorship.

South Africa lost a gifted and sensitive poet when, at the age of 31, Ingrid Jonker ended her own life on 19 July 1965.

Much of Jonker’s early writing evidently relates to the episodes and trauma of her early life. Yet as a mature poet, Jonker never failed to express compassion for her fellow human beings, reflecting a refreshing innocence devoid of pernicious social prejudice and hatred.

Commenting on Jonker’s poem Die Kind (The Child), which Former President Nelson Mandela read out in full in his inaugural State of the Nation address to Parliament in May 1994, he said, “In this glorious vision, she instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child”.

For her excellent contribution to literature and a commitment to the struggle for human rights and democracy in South Africa, the South African Government bestowed Ingrid Jonker with the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver at the National Orders awards on 19 October 2004.

Information sourced from: South African History Online.