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Today, exactly 45 years ago, a young woman, poet and activist, both Afrikaner and African, met her untimely death in the waters of Cape Town.
Ingrid Jonker was the daughter of Beatrice Cilliers and Abraham Jonker, a prominent member and later minister of the Apartheid regime. At the age of twelve, some of her first poems were published. In the years that followed, she became one of the most gifted poets of her generation, celebrated over the world but remaining controversial in South Africa.
She and her friends, time and again, protested against the racial segregation of the Apartheid regime. They stood up with their colleagues of color and violated censorship laws. At the heights of the Apartheid regime, when peaceful protests resulted into bloody massacres, Ingrid Jonker voiced hope and celebrated life in her poetry.
When her poetry was no longer heard in South Africa and with the lives of her loved ones being threatened, she herself had no more hope for the future. She walked into the Three Anchor Bay in Cape Town to her death at the age of 32.
It took almost thirty years before she was finally remembered, by the first president of South Africa, elected by the South African people, in his first State of the Union in 1994. Nelson Mandela recited one of her most beautiful, heartbreaking but hopeful poems: Die Kind, about a young boy who had been shot to death by Apartheid soldiers during a protest march at Nyanga.
I can only try to imagine what she would have written in today’s South Africa, if she had not given her life 45 years ago. What she would say, knowing how her poetry is so inspirational to many of her readers in South Africa and around the world today, including myself, and time and again makes us realize how we owe a commitment the poor, the oppressed and the despised.
The meter of her poetry and the prosody of her spoken word resemble the first steps of a young child who walks with a sense of wonder and amazement. Her words spoke to me when I was young and started writing, and reminded me how fortunate I was to grow up in the relative safety of the Netherlands. They remind me especially today of how important it is to give something back and contribute to society. Remembering the work and life of people like Ingrid Jonker makes us feel assured that they did not die in vain.
Date: July 19 2010
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