Library Weekly

The ASCL's Library Weekly is our library’s weekly spotlight on African people and events. Inspired by the SciHiBlog, this service is based on information retrieved from Wikipedia and Wikidata and is completed with selected titles from the ASCL Library Catalogue.

N.B. The weeklies are not updated and reflect the state of information at a given point in time.

Library Weekly archive

Ingrid Jonker

Ingrid Jonker, 1956 (Wikimedia Commons, TheTimes.co.za, Public domain) On 19 July 1965, South African poet Ingrid Jonker died at the age of 31. Her poems have been widely translated from Afrikaans into other languages. In April 2004 Jonker was posthumously awarded the Order of Ikhamanga by the South African government for "her excellent contribution to literature and a commitment to the struggle for human rights and democracy in South Africa”.

Ingrid Jonker was born on her maternal grandfather's farm near Douglas, Northern Cape, on 19 September 1933. During the 1950s and 60s, which saw the Sharpeville Massacre and increasingly draconian enforcement of Apartheid laws, Jonker chose to affiliate herself with Cape Town's racially mixed literary bohemia. In both her poems and in newspaper interviews, Jonker angrily 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. Troubled by depressions, Jonker drowned herself on July 19, 1965.

In his inaugural State of the Nation address to Parliament on 24 May 1994, Nelson Mandela praised Jonker's role as a critic of Apartheid and read her poem Die kind (wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga) ('The child (who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga)') in English translation.

(Source: Wikipedia)