Rook en Oker by Ingrid Jonker (1st Edition)

Author: Jonker, Ingrid 
Title: Rook en Oker 
Publisher: Afrikaanse-Pers Boekhandel 
Date: 1963 
Place: Johannesburg 
Dimensions: 8vo. 21.5cm x 13.5cm 

1st edition. iv+53pp+ii(index)

Jacket design by Nico Hagen with whom Jonker is reported to have had romantic involvement. Rook en Oker, Jonker’s second and final collection to appear before her suicide by drowning, was published under the auspices of the progressive new head of publications at Afrikaanse-Pers, Bartho Smit. Probably her most famous poem Die Kind (In English translated as The Child who was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga) first appeared in this collection. Then chairman of the board of Afrikaanse-Pers, Prime Minister and architect of Apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd, instructed Smit not to publish the poem, which he saw as blatant criticism of his government. Jonker issued an ultimatum to Smit: she would sooner find another publisher than be censored. Smit, eager to publish Jonker’s work, subsequently convinced Verwoerd of its overall literary merit and to allow publication of Die Kind in a section of the work containing other children’s poems (Metelerkamp, 2018).

In the opening of his first State of the Nation address on 24 May 1994, the first democratically elected President of the Republic of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, said of Jonker that “(s)he 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 with death, she asserted the beauty of life. In the dark days when all seemed hopeless in our country, when many refused to hear her resonant voice, she took her own life. To her and others like her, we owe a debt to life itself. To her and others like her, we owe a commitment to the poor, the oppressed, the wretched and the despised. In the aftermath of the massacre at the anti-pass demonstration in Sharpeville she wrote that..” and then read aloud Jonker’s poem The Child. 

A very good copy indeed in like jacket. Slight foxing to top edge, small chips to head and tail of jacket spine. A touch of foxing to the verso of the jacket and to the rear paste-down, under the rear jacket flap. Rear jacket panel lightly soiled.