Ingrid Jonker

Ingrid Jonker (19 September 1933 – 19 July 1965) was a South African poet and accomplished figure in modern Afrikaans literature. Her poems have been widely translated into other languages.

Born into an Afrikaner family with 400-year-old roots in South Africa, Jonker grew up in an unstable family. After the death of her mother, she and her sister Anna moved in with their until-then-estranged father, where they encountered significant emotional abuse from their stepmother before both moving out.

During the 1950s and 1960s, which saw the Sharpeville massacre, the increasingly draconian enforcement of Apartheid laws, and escalating terrorism committed both by Government security forces and by the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress, Jonker chose to affiliate herself with Cape Town's racially mixed literary bohemia, which gathered around her fellow Afrikaner poet and literary mentor Uys Krige in the beach-side suburb of Clifton. In both her poems and in newspaper interviews, Jonker denounced the ruling National Party's racial policies and the increasing censorship of literature and the media. This brought her into open conflict with her father, a widely respected Member of Parliament for the ruling Party. In 1965, Jonker's childhood trauma, recent failed marriage, and her disastrous relationships with several different men led to her major depression and finally suicide by drowning. Even so, Jonker has reached iconic status in post-Apartheid South Africa and is often compared with Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe.

Family origins

On both sides of the family, the ancestors of Ingrid Jonker had lived in South Africa for centuries. Her forefather on her father's side, Adolph Jonker, was the son of a plantation owner from Macassar, in the Dutch East Indies, and had emigrated to the Cape Colony during the early 18th century. Adolph Jonker became the schoolteacher and warden of the Dutch Reformed congregation at Drakenstein. In 1740, he married Maria Petronella Langeveld, the daughter of Jacobus Langveld and an unknown woman from the Cape.

Ingrid's father Abraham Jonker (1905–1966), was born on 22 April 1905 on the Kalkfontein farm, in the Boshoff district of the former Orange Free State. In 1910, Abraham lost his older sister to drowning. As he later recalled, "I wasn't five years old yet and she drowned in the Vaal River at the age of eight, on the same day that King Edward VII died, because I still remember well how all the flags were hanging half-mast when we went to fetch the little coffin in town the following day with the hooded cart – the day my late father came to wake us at four o'clock to see Halley's Comet that was clearly visible in the sky. We all felt so awful, because my late sister's little body was still lying in the house."

After graduating high school in 1922, Jonker studied at the University of Stellenbosch between 1923 and 1930. He obtained a Bachelor's Degree, majoring in Ancient Greek and Dutch and in theology. Jonker's theological studies, were, however, more out of a desire to please his parents than out of any real interest. In 1928, Jonker was awarded the theological candidates diploma with honours.

According to a December 1966 article by Jack Cope in the London Magazine, Ingrid's, "mother, Beatrice Cilliers, came from an old Huguenot family, with generations of intellectual attainments."

While the ancestors of the Cilliers family had left France in order to continue practicing their Calvinist faith, Ingrid's grandfather, Stephanie "Swart Fanie" ("Black Stevie") was known for his indifference to religious practice and mockery of dignified local Dutch Reformed ministers. Ingrid's grandmother, Annie Retief Cilliers (1873–1957), was a devoutly religious woman who enjoyed preaching to coloured people. She attended the Apostolic Church, because they were so "lively and jolly", as Ingrid later wrote.

Ingrid's sister, Anna Jonker, later wrote, "The one story Ingrid always wanted to hear, was how it happened that Oupa married Ouma. Ouma had been in love with Oupa's brother, but he had the habit of crowing like a rooster – and the Ouma would crow, to let us hear what it sounded like – so she decided to marry Swart Fanie. The story always ended with, 'And I used to think he wouldn't be that foolish!'"

Also according to Anna Jonker, "Swart Fanie" had "a fiery temperament" and once "tore up the documentary proof that the English had commandeered virtually all his mules and wagons during the Anglo-Boer War and hurled them back at an English officer."

Beatrice Catharina Cilliers (1905–1944), the daughter of "Swart Fanie" and Anna Cilliers, met Abraham Jonker while she was studying music at the University of Stellenbosch and married him in 1930.

After their marriage, Abraham Jonker first worked as a travelling organiser for the National Party before becoming a journalist in Cape Town for such publications as Burger, Die Huisgenoot, Jongspan, and Suiderstem. Jonker also obtained a doctorate with honours in Afrikaans literature. He also started his own bilingual magazine, Die Monitor, which he sold himself in order to, as he put it, dedicate himself exclusively to journalism and literature.

Abraham Jonker also published books and short story collections during the early 1930s. Louise Viljoen writes, "The critical response to his literary work remained lukewarm, perhaps because of his preference for the European-inspired Nuwe Saaklikheid ("Modern Objectivity") was very different from the confessional mode newly popular in Afrikaans literature at the time. Because of the sombre worldview reflected in his writing, Ingrid Jonker's Dutch biographer Henk van Woerden typecast him as a secular Calvinist and described him as an aloof, panic-stricken Puritan." By his own admission, however, Abraham Jonker had never expected or desired immortality as a writer and always considered his own poetry substandard. Jonker admitted, however, that the greatest influence, even upon his journalistic output, and from who, "I learned that clear simplicity in whatever needs to be said", was Omar Khayyam, "with whom I first became acquainted at the age of twelve or thirteen and to whose work I always return, even though I have loved a great deal of the world's poets since then."

By 1933, Abraham and Beatrice Jonker were part of a circle of Cape Town intellectuals who "joined the old Cape traditions of discussing cultural, political, and social matters." Gladstone Louw later described "the writer and journalist Abraham Jonker" as "intelligent, but surly and then already frustrated". At the same time, however, Abraham and Beatrice Jonker would often perform duets together at social gatherings. Beatrice played the piano, while Abraham performed upon the violin.

There were serious troubles, however, in the Jonkers' marriage. Ingrid's half-brother, Koos Jonker, later recalled, "Beatrice, Ingrid's mother, suffered from hallucinations and sometimes acted irrationally – even before she left my father."

Family friend W.A. de Klerk later recalled, "I would say Ingrid's incapacity to find any happiness on a personal level should be seen in terms of her own broken home background. Her father was not an easy man. He often became violent... My wife remembers the evenings very well when Ingrid's mother fled the house with Annatije as a small child."