patron-saints:

The Overlooked Ladies of History:

     Ingrid Jonker was born into an Afrikanner family in 1930s apartheid South Africa. Following her mother’s death when Jonker was ten, she and her sister were raised by their estranged father, with whom she would always have a contentious relationship. As a politician in the pro-apartheid National Party (and the eventual Minister of Censorship), Jonker’s father was constantly at odds with his willful, free-spirited daughter. Finding solace from her tribulations in writing, Jonker completed her first collection of poems when she was thirteen. At the age of thirty she published a collection of poetry entitled “Smoke and Ochre”, a volume of largely anti-apartheid poetry, despite resistance from the government and the complete alienation from her father that resulted. Her poetry became iconic in a South Africa which systematically oppressed black voices. Her most famous poem “Die Kind (the Child)” was inspired by the death of a black child shot in its mother’s arms by soldiers during the Sharpeville Massacre. Almost thirty years after her suicide in 1965, Nelson Mandela read the poem during his address to South Africa’s first democratic parliament. Of Jonker herself, Mandela said that: “She was both a poet and a South African. She was both an Afrikaner and an African. She was both an artist and a human being. In the midst of despair, she celebrated hope. Confronted by death, she asserted the beauty of life.”

The Child

The child is not dead

The child lifts his fist against his mother

Who shouts Afrika! shout the breath

Of freedom and the veld

In the shanty-towns of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fist against his father

In the march of the generations

Who are shouting Afrika! shout the breath

Of righteousness and blood

In the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead

Not at Langa nor at Nyanga

Nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville

Nor at the police station at Philippi

Where he lies with a bullet through his head

The child is the shadow of the soldiers

On guard with their rifles saracens and batons

The child is present at all assemblies and legislation

The child peers through the windows of houses and into the 

hearts of mothers

This child who just longed to play in the sun at Nyanga is

everywhere

The child grown into a man treks on through all Africa

The child grown into a giant journeys over the whole world

Carrying no pass