58 Facts About Ingrid Jonker

Ingrid Jonker was a South African poet and one of the founders of modern Afrikaans literature.

Ingrid Jonker's poems have been widely translated into other languages.

In both her poems and in newspaper interviews, Ingrid Jonker denounced the ruling National Party's racial policies and the increasing censorship of literature and the media.

On both sides of the family, the ancestors of Ingrid Jonker had lived in South Africa for centuries.

Adolph Ingrid Jonker became the schoolteacher and warden of the Dutch Reformed congregation at Drakenstein.

Ingrid Jonker obtained a Bachelor's Degree, majoring in Ancient Greek and Dutch and in theology.

In 1928, Ingrid Jonker was awarded the theological candidates diploma with honours.

Ingrid Jonker's grandmother, Annie Retief Cilliers, was a devoutly religious woman who enjoyed preaching to coloured people.

Ingrid Jonker attended the Apostolic Church, because they were so "lively and jolly", as Ingrid later wrote.

Ingrid Jonker 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 Ingrid Jonker published books and short story collections during the early 1930s.

My wife remembers the evenings very well when Ingrid Jonker's mother fled the house with Annatije as a small child.

Ingrid Jonker was born on her maternal grandfather's farm near Douglas, Northern Cape, on 19 September 1933.

Shortly before her birth, Ingrid's mother Beatrice and her older sister Anna had left Abraham H Jonker's house in the Cape Town suburb of Vredehoek, after Abraham Jonker allegedly accused his wife of adultery during an argument and suggested that her unborn daughter was not his child.

Ingrid Jonker was three or four years old and the family was just as upset about that as about the unusual name she was given.

Ingrid Jonker never forgot those words; never spoke about it, but she must have started realising then why she was Ouma's heartache child.

Ingrid Jonker really wanted a Bible and that, together with the spinning top when she was a baby, were the only presents she received from Pa in her childhood days.

We got into the car, and Ingrid Jonker wouldn't let go of Ouma's hand through the open window.

Ingrid Jonker sat at the back and kept looking around at Ouma's little black figure at the side of the road.

Ingrid Jonker's third marriage was to Lulu Brewis, an author of children's books, in 1941.

Ingrid Jonker was in primary school and I was in high school.

Every Sunday, Abraham Ingrid Jonker would pick his daughters up from the boarding house and bring them to spend the day with him, their step-mother Lulu, and the infant Koos.

Ingrid Jonker was coming to visit us in the big house in Plumstead, for example, shortly after we had gone to live in Cape Town.

Ingrid Jonker was a member of parliament and was often away from home.

Whether Abraham Ingrid Jonker's changing political views were the result of careerism or inner conviction, they would bring him into open confrontation with his daughter.

Anna and Ingrid Jonker were vagabonds, they roamed the beaches from an early age.

School records reveal Ingrid Jonker to have been a well behaved but average student, who preferred to devote herself only to those subjects she liked.

Ingrid Jonker's writing was praised by her teachers and she began writing poetry for the school magazine.

Anna later recalled how she travelled from Johannesburg, where she was working at the time, to help Ingrid Jonker obtain permission from their father to leave the house in Plumstead.

At the age of sixteen, Ingrid Jonker submitted her first collection of poems, Na die somer to Nasionale Boekhandel.

Ingrid Jonker used the money to rent a small apartment above the sea in the suburb of Clifton, which she shared with her close friend, Jean "Bambi" du Preez.

Ingrid Jonker continued sending her poems to popular magazines like Die Huisgenoot, Naweekpos, and Rooi Rose, as well as the literary journal Standpunte.

Ingrid Jonker took lessons in elocution, acting, and in sculpting from her father's friend Florencio Cuairan.

Ingrid Jonker's voice is that of a cultured woman, calm and confident.

Ingrid Jonker's first published book of poems, Ontvlugting, was published in 1956.

The depression caused by her father's rejection of her forced Ingrid Jonker to enter the Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital in 1961.

Thereafter, Ingrid Jonker became known as one of the Die Sestigers, a group that included Breyten Breytenbach, Andre Brink, Adam Small and Bartho Smit, who were challenging the extreme Afrikaner nationalism of the ruling National Party.

Ingrid Jonker asked Jack Cope to accompany her, but he refused.

Ingrid Jonker accepted and they went to Paris and Barcelona together.

Ingrid Jonker then cut her tour short and returned to Cape Town.

Ingrid Jonker had started writing a new collection of poems just before her death.

Ingrid Jonker then witnessed a shattering event: a black baby was shot by white soldiers and died in his mother's arms.

Ingrid Jonker underlined from Dylan Thomas: "after the first death, there is no other".

Ingrid Jonker met Pieter Venter, her future husband, at a bohemian party held at Sea Point in 1954.

Venter, who was 15 years Ingrid Jonker's senior, worked in Cape Town as the sales manager for a company that took foreign tourists on African safaris.

The news of Ingrid Jonker's death devastated, but didn't shock, those who knew her.

Ingrid Jonker was rejected by her father, her people and her lover, even Uys so self-absorbed in his own emotions.

Ingrid Jonker began drinking alcohol heavily, though doctors had warned that it could kill him.

Abraham Ingrid Jonker died of an aneurysm in his aorta on 10 January 1966, six months after the suicide of his daughter.

Ingrid Jonker was well respected, not only by his constituency, but by the general public.

Ingrid Jonker remained a trustee of the Trust until his death in 1991.

Ingrid Jonker's poetry has been translated from Afrikaans into English, German, French, Dutch, Polish, Hindi and Zulu, among others.

Ingrid Jonker wrote a one-act play n Seun na my Hart about a mother's illusions about her handicapped son.

Mandela then read Ingrid Jonker's poem, Die kind in English translation.

In 2001 a documentary about Ingrid Jonker was produced for Dutch television by Saskia van Schaik: Korreltjie niks is my dood.

In 2002 the one-woman, interactive play by Ryk Hattingh, Opdrag: Ingrid Jonker, was staged at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival starring Jana Cilliers.

In 2007 a documentary Ingrid Jonker, her Lives and Time by Mozambique-born South African film and documentary director Helena Nogueira was released in South Africa.

Also in 2011, South African musician Chris Chameleon released an album of Ingrid Jonker's works, entitled As Jy Weer Skryf.