In memory of my grandfather, Danie Van Niekerk (1928-2022)

When we were little, my grandfather wasn’t the type to play games or make jokes. Words were his bread and butter, but he was a man of surprisingly few of them. Even so, he was a formidable presence – someone with a glowing aura. We were acutely aware of the high expectations he had of us – we were even a little scared of him – though eager to impress.

I remember having dinner one evening at my grandparents’ house. They were babysitting; our parents were out. My brothers and I sat at the kitchen table, never daring to say anything except a loud and clear “THANK YOU” each time they put something in front of us. He catches my grandmother’s eye. “At least they have good manners,” he says.

He was always just himself, and with all his idiosyncrasies and without trying, he was categorically cool. If you slept over at my grandparents’ house, you would wake up to the drone of the blender, and if your little pajama-clad legs carried you up the steps of their three-story house, you were greeted with one of his exotic fruit smoothies – all sorts of combinations of peach, orange, guava, grapefruit, papaya or banana, with a breakfast of yogurt and muesli, rustic bread and butter and a couple of different cheeses, all laid out neatly on the table. In the summer he would pick up frankfurters and salt-encrusted pretzel rolls from the German deli at Gardens Center, and serve gourmet hot dogs with hot English mustard and icy glasses of Coke by the pool – the ice made pebbly with an ice crusher he’d bought in New York. He loved his contraptions.

He would pick me up from school in the afternoons and take me out for Italian coffee, teach me French words and introduce me to classical music on his car radio. Later he would give me Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on CD. At their beach house in Hermanus there were shelves upon shelves of Hollywood blockbusters he’d recorded on VHS, their titles painstakingly written on stickers and arranged alphabetically.

His systematic way of doing things was part of his charm. Like when he turned up each week to drop off the latest issue of The New Yorker, or the latest episode of The Simpsons on tape. Or when he cut out the cartoons from The New Yorker to stick on his fridge – especially if they were about dogs. He was crazy about dogs, and his own – Waaksaam and Custos the rottweilers, Aapstert the staffie, and Stoffel the Rhodesian Ridgeback– were a big presence in our lives.

As our sense of humor and our taste in movies and books became more sophisticated, our relationship with him deepened. When my brother Daniel developed an interest in art, he found an especially great resource in our grandpa. With our parents we would do Sunday night movie nights at their house, and take in a new arthouse or indie film. I remember watching Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation for the first time – an especially gripping and melancholy film for a family of linguaphiles.

When I think back, I wonder if the film made such an impression on me because the threat that something was “lost in translation” had always dimly flickered at the back of my mind. It was no secret that our grandparents didn’t want us to go to English schools, that they worried that our relationship with our mother tongue would disintegrate. With what I’ve learned about his career over the years – not least of all through reading his self-published memoir – it makes sense why this was so important to him. The apex of his career as publisher was to progress Afrikaans literature as we know it. That was his legacy. Would he have left it to grandchildren for whom it had no meaning, who couldn’t appreciate it because they didn’t have this world in common?

Just how significant this legacy is has slowly dawned on me over time– precisely because it wasn’t his style to talk about himself or his achievements. I read The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena at school, and watched the play, and was aware of the impact it had internationally. It was years, however, before I realized that it must have taken courage to publish. I also read Griet Skryf ‘n Sprokie, but it was only in retrospect that I considered what a broad mind he must have had – as an Afrikaans man of retirement age – to recognize the brilliance of that explosive, risqué novella.

My grandfather’s life story rewards those who take the time to get to know it. His 2005 interview with Murray La Vita is an archive of stories about the people behind some of the most significant voices in contemporary Afrikaans literature. It’s ironic, then, that the interview ends with these words, from an email: “‘After you left,’” he writes to La Vita, “‘the ghosts began circling my head: old spirits eddying, books and writers whispering, ‘did you forget about us?’ My memory is bad and like Moses I am heavy of tongue.’”

Nobody could claim that my grandfather’s memory was bad. His recall of names and details was on display in the interview and impressive until the end. But his reference to the biblical stutterer eerily foreshadows a symptom of Parkinson’s disease that would plague him later on. As I learned more about him over the years, my curiosity only increased as his ability to speak began to deteriorate.

Where did his impulse come from, I wondered, to send Nelson Mandela a package of poetry anthologies in 1975, when Mandela was in prison on Robben Island? It was long before it was mainstream for white South Africans – or even the international community for that matter – to support him. And why didn’t he tell anyone about the letter that Mandela wrote back in perfect Afrikaans?

Though he wanted us to share his language and its heritage, he wasn’t the type to cling to his progeny, to insist that we remain in his corner of the world. He was at home in the world at large, and wanted our horizons to be limitless, borderless, and for us to follow our passions. Because of him we have been able to pursue postgraduate studies in New York and London – in journalism and literature, epidemiology, art, and technology – not only because he helped and encouraged us, but also because he opened our minds. We wish we could have shared more of what we’re doing, but I hope he knew that his influence would stretch much further than our generation or our country.

For the well-traveled humanist, the Renaissance-man, the scholar and the gentleman – as so many have described him – I hope this provided a kind of peace.