Ingrid Jonker

Date: July 5, 2012 | Posted in Gordons Bay Reviews | Helderberg News | News

Cape Town artist Tyrone Appollis next to his memorial sculpture for Ingrid Jonker

When passing by the little sculpture in honour of Ingrid Jonker on the beachfront path, there are people, especially visitors and newcomers to Gordon’s Bay, who have wondered who she was and what her ties were with Gordon’s Bay. After all, it was in Three Anchor Bay where she famously walked into the sea to end her young life at the age of thirty three.

Ingrid Jonker (1933 – 1965) is a South African icon, who due to the intensity of her writing and the tragic course of her life, is often compared to her American contemporary, Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963).

She was part of the “Sestiger” (Sixties) movement, which challenged the established literary, cultural and political order with flagrant disregard, mixing freely with Black artists, indulging in wild affairs and shunning the religious norms of the day. Much has been written about Ingrid’s later life, but what was her connection to Gordon’s Bay?

The fact is that Ingrid spent the happiest years of her life here in Gordon’s Bay when as a young child between the ages of five and seven years old, and began her school career here. She was born on her grandparent’s, Ouma and Oupa Cilliers, farm near Douglas in the Free State. Her mother, Beatrice, had already left Ingrid’s father, Abraham Jonker.

Following the death of her grandfather, Ouma Annie, along with her daughter and granddaughters Ingrid and her sister Anna, moved to Strand. They were as poor as churchmice and had to keep moving, but the children were blissfully happy and free to play on the beach until after dark. Some afternoons the two girls walked on their own the entire length of the beach from Strand to Gordon’s Bay specifically to play on the ‘big dune’ just outside Gordon’s Bay. Their wealthy aunt from Constantia called them ‘wild untamed children’, but for them, life was all about the fields and the sea.

After Ingrid survived an near fatal illness, her mother decided to move the family to Gordon’s Bay because she felt that the climate was healthier. Their new house was near to the hotel with a river running along the back of the property. It was paradise for the little girls with it’s bank of white and red clay, a constant source of material from which to fashion clay dolls and oxen. They collected food from the surrounding fields, and Ouma cooked waterblommetjies along with mussels and periwinkles collected from the rock pools.

Ingrid Jonker

But it was not all play. The girls would walk up the long cement path to the little school on the hill, which Ingrid loved, especially the pine woods on the mountainside behind the school building. During playtime, they often sat there in total silence waiting for the rabbits that would come out and crop the grass. They would become so engrossed in their little secret world that often they did not hear the school bell and as a result, would miss the final classes of the day.

In winter the river would flood and the house became an island, so that the children would be housebound for almost a week, missing school in the process. Beatrice decided that they had to move to another house where the children would have no excuse to miss further school lessons.

The new house was even better than the river house, because there was a large back yard with a stream from the river forming a border behind the house, a perfect place to farm tadpoles! They also kept four chickens, cats and an injured dove. This was the happiest time in Ingrid’s life; she had already begun to write childrens verses. “Our lives consisted of sea and veld, animals and books.”

Ingrid died on July 1996, but she is still regarded as one of South Africa’s foremost Afrikaans poets. Her poem ‘The Child is not Dead’, was read out by Nelson Mandela on May 24 1994 at the opening of the new Parilament in the New South Africa. It was written in 1960 just after the Sharpville riots.

The child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers.

This child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere.

The child grown to a man treks through all Africa

The child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world.

Without a pass

In 2006, The Sunday times, as part of their Easter celebrations, commissioned a series of sculptures throughout the country in view of honouring past South Africans who have helped shape the country’s history. A local artist, Tyrone Appolis, inspired by the poem, sculpted a tricycle as a concept of the child. The tiny slops that hang on the handlbars symbolises lost childhood.

Nelson Mandel said of Ingrid “She was both a poet and as South Africa. Confronted by death, she asserted the beauty of life”

Sources: Petrovna Mterlerkam – Infgrid Jonker, Beeld van ‘n Digterlewe’

The Internet.

She was the shinning star of the “Sestigers” (artists of the 60’s) who gathered around poet Uys Krige, on Clifton beach in Cape Town.

on the one hand, and the sincere, “modern” outlook of the Sestiger authors on the other hand. This tension was characteristic of a new independence and maturity of the Afrikaans literary scene.

They were the first generation of Afrikaners to turn away from the brooding Calvinism of their fathers and look to Latin Europe for new inspiration. They scoffed at religion with its dubious morals on race and sex and, with flagrant disregard for Apartheid, mixed freely with Black artists. They had wild affairs that they wrote into novels that were banned before they were even published… in one decade they changed forever the course of Afrikaans literature. Ingrid was their brightest star. Uys called her a goddess. Jack called her his muse…

But her short life was characterized as much by genius as by torment. Rejected by her father before she was born – the prominent MP threw out his wife in disgrace – Ingrid watched her mother descend into poverty and spiral into madness until she commit suicide when Ingrid was 10. The fear of ending up like her mother haunted her all her life. Especially as she found herself rejected by men and was forced to contemplate abortion…

Writers Jack Cope and Andre Brink would fight over her, but would not commit. Ingrid could inspire wild passions, but was unable to inspire love…

Her inner turmoil was mirrored by the country’s upheaval. To the Black unrest assailing the country, PM Verwoerd responded with banning, house arrest and detention without trial. Artists and intellectuals were targeted. A censorship commission was formed – the chairman, Dr Abraham Jonker, Ingrid’s father…

And then she witnesses a shattering event: a Black baby was shot in his mother’ arms… She underlined from Dylan Thomas: “after the first death, there is no other”. And she wrote: “The child who died at Nyanga”. Like Dylan Thomas she understood that she could no longer soar above the horror and the moral collapse of her world.

Plunged in to a destructive love triangle between Jack Cope and Andre Brink, she finally committed suicide by walking into the sea at Three Anchor Bay, Sea Point. She was 31 and the greatest poet of her generation.