page_title: Ingrid Jonker
section_title: Literary legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Ingrid Jonker / Legacy / Literary legacy
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Ingrid Jonker - Die kind wat dood geskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga. Muurgedicht dat in het kader van het project Gedichten op muren van de Stichting TEGEN-BEELD is aangebracht op een muur in de Nederlandse stad Leiden.English: Wallpoem in de city of Leiden in the Netherlands.
context_page_description: Ingrid Jonker, was a South African poet. While she wrote in Afrikaans, her poems have been widely translated into other languages.
  During the 1950s and 60s, which saw the Sharpeville Massacre, the increasingly draconian enforcement of Apartheid laws, and escalating violence between Government security forces and the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress, 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 South African Government's racial policies and the increasing censorship of literature. This brought her into open conflict with her father, a Member of Parliament for the ruling National Party. Ultimately, Jonker's turbulent love life caused Cape Town's literary bohemia to subject her to social ostracism, which led her to depression and suicide. Even so, Jonker has reached iconic status in post-Apartheid South Africa and is often compared with Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe.
context_section_description: Jonker's poetry has been translated from Afrikaans into English, German, French, Dutch, Polish, Hindi and Zulu, among others. She wrote a one-act play 'n Seun na my Hart ("A son after my heart") about a mother's illusions about her handicapped son. Jonker also wrote several short stories.
  The prestigious Ingrid Jonker Prize for the best debut work of Afrikaans or English poetry was instituted by her friends to honour her legacy after her burial in 1965. This yearly prize, consisting of R1000 and a medal, is awarded alternately to an Afrikaans or English poet who has published a first volume in the previous two years.
  In 1975, Afrikaner poet and fellow political dissident Breyten Breytenbach was arrested and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for high treason: his memoir The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist describes his imprisonment. According to André Brink, Breytenbach was retried in June 1977 on new and fanciful charges that, among other things, he had planned a submarine attack by the Soviet Navy on the prison at Robben Island through the conspiratorial "Okhela Organisation." In the end, the judge found him guilty only of having smuggled letters and poems out of jail, for which he was fined 50 dollars.
  While serving his time as a political prisoner, Breytenbach wrote the poem, Ballade van ontroue bemindes("Ballade of Unfaithful Lovers"). Inspired by François Villon's Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis, Breytenbach compared Peter Blum, Ingrid Jonker, and himself to unfaithful lovers, who had betrayed Afrikaans poetry by taking leave of it.
  At the opening of the first democratically elected Parliament of South Africa on 24 May 1994, Nelson Mandela praised Jonker's role as a critic of Apartheid and suggested that her suicide was an extreme protest against a nation that refused to hear her. Mandela then read Jonker's poem, Die kind (wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga) ("The child (who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga)") in English translation.
  The poet's friend Elize Botha, however, disputes Mandela's claims about the reasons for Ingrid's suicide, "Her tragic death was not due to the political system  of those days. In fact, she was known to be against the suppression of any ideology. Her death was preceded by a feeling of desperate loneliness and rejection on a purely human level."
caption: Die Kind as a wall poem in Leiden
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