Ingrid Jonker

The body in the sea

by tonymac04

In the early hours of the morning of 19 July 1965 a lovely young woman walked into the sea at Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town, and drowned. Her lifeless body was found by the police in about three feet of water at about 7.30 that morning. And so ended the life of one of South Africa's most promising young writers, a poet of great power and originality, a voice of honesty and openness, a person with a great love of life and the life of words.

Ingrid Jonker, the young poet who died so tragically, has since become an icon in South Africa, especially among young people who love literature, and has achieved in death a fame far beyond what she had experienced, or, perhaps, even hoped for, in life.

She was an Afrikaner, the daughter of a Nationalist Party Member of Parliament, and yet was honoured by the Government of a free and democratic South Africa for "her excellent contribution to literature and a commitment to the struggle for human rights and democracy in South Africa."

Even before the advent of democracy in South Africa, the then President of the African National Congress, the late O.R. Tambo, in a 1987 speech in Harare, Zimbabwe, had this to say about her: "By her death, she joined herself to the children of our country about whom she had written. Her tragic passing was as powerful an indictment of the apartheid system as were these verses which she has left us."

And when Nelson Mandela, on 24 May 1994, opened the first democratic parliament in South Africa as the first democratically elected Black president of the country he quoted her poem "Die kind wat dood geskiet is deur soldate byNyanga" (The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga) and said these words: “The time will come when our nation will honour the memory of those who gave us the right to assert with pride that we are South Africans, that we are Africans and citizens of the world. The certainties that come with age tell me that among these we shall find an Afrikaner woman… Her name is Ingrid Jonker.”