During the 1950s and 1960s, which saw the Sharpeville massacre, the increasingly draconian enforcement of Apartheid laws, and escalating terrorism committed both by Government security forces and by the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress, Jonker chose to affiliate herself with Cape Town's racially mixed literary bohemia, which gathered around her fellow Afrikaner poet and literary mentor Uys Krige in the beach-side suburb of Clifton.

In 1965, Jonker's childhood trauma, recent failed marriage, and her disastrous relationships with several different men led to her major depression and finally suicide by drowning.

Her forefather on her father's side, Adolph Jonker, was the son of a plantation owner from Macassar, in the Dutch East Indies, and had emigrated to the Cape Colony during the early 18th century.

[3] According to a December 1966 article by Jack Cope in the London Magazine, Ingrid's, "mother, Beatrice Cilliers, came from an old Huguenot family, with generations of intellectual attainments.

[8] After their marriage, Abraham Jonker first worked as a travelling organiser for the National Party before becoming a journalist in Cape Town for such publications as Burger, Die Huisgenoot, Jongspan, and Suiderstem.

Louise Viljoen writes, "The critical response to his literary work remained lukewarm, perhaps because of his preference for the European-inspired Nuwe Saaklikheid ("Modern Objectivity") was very different from the confessional mode newly popular in Afrikaans literature at the time.

Because of the sombre worldview reflected in his writing, Ingrid Jonker's Dutch biographer Henk van Woerden typecast him as a secular Calvinist and described him as an aloof, panic-stricken Puritan.

Ingrid later wrote, "At the time my father was not with the family and my grandfather Fanie Cilliers, a top joke teller, paralyzed and bedridden for 15 years, but the wittiest person I ever knew, ruled the house in his own exuberant way.

I still remember how hard it was for me to walk down that long dirt road, holding Ouma's hand, her jokes along the way and the glimmer in her deep green eyes when she looked down at me.

They picked fruit from plants in the veld, gathered shellfish from the rock pools, played with tadpoles in the stream behind their house and buried small objects called 'secrets' in the ground.

In response, Ingrid and Annie Cilliers, "prayed and read", the passages from the Book of Revelation about the Scarlet Woman, whom they believed to represent the Roman Catholic Church.

van der Merwe, "Anna Jonker points out that their father was happy to have his older daughters at home with him and that he tried his best to minimize the friction between them and their stepmother.

[43] According to Louise Viljoen, "Some of these poems (for instance Skrik and Keuse) include veiled hints at romantic longing and an awakening sexuality, often reigned in by feelings of religious guilt.

It is difficult to reconstruct the inner life of the adolescent Ingrid on the basis of these poems, because the expression of feeling in them is still guarded, hemmed in by schoolgirl decorum and the writerly rhetoric of a previous generation of Afrikaans poets.

[46] With her secretarial skills, Ingrid obtained a job working for the Kennis publishing house at the Here XVII Building in downtown Cape Town by late in 1952.

Although she gave the impression of being vulnerable and defenseless, there must also have been a measure of resilience and determination in her character to have enabled her to overcome the deprivation of her early years and develop artistically and socially after she left her father's house.

"[52] Her father, already a writer, editor and National Party Member of Parliament, was appointed chairman of the parliamentary select committee responsible for censorship laws on art, publications and entertainment.

Rook en oker won Jonker the £1000 Afrikaanse Pers-Boekhandel (Afrikaans Press-Booksellers) Literary Award, as well as a scholarship from the Anglo American Corporation.

Venter, who was 15 years Ingrid's senior, worked in Cape Town as the sales manager for a company that took foreign tourists on African safaris.

[53] After Abraham Jonker walked his daughter, who wore a white dress, down the aisle and gave her away, Piet and Ingrid Venter were married inside the Congregational Church in Paarl on 15 December 1956.

[63] According to Marjorie Wallace, Lulu Jonker approached her step-daughter's friends and told them that those under banning orders would be arrested if any of Ingrid's poem's were read aloud, as that would turn the funeral into a political gathering.

After being refused permission to attend by both the school principal and the local Dutch Reformed minister, the pupils held a private prayer service for Ingrid Jonker, at which her poems were read aloud.

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.

[74] A number of her poems have been set to music over the years, beginning with the song cycle Vyf liedere for soprano and piano by Stefans Grové (1981), and sung by such artists as Laurika Rauch, Anneli van Rooyen and Chris Chameleon.

In 2003 ddisselblom, an Afrikaans pop group, released an eponymously titled CD containing the track Falkenburg, a very well executed adaptation of Jonker's "Ontvlugting".

Based on a script by Helena Nogueira workshopped at Johannesburg's Market Theatre, the film focusses on three years in the life of Jonker and the Sestigers who gathered around poet Uys Krige at Clifton in Cape Town.

The film is produced by David Parfitt (Shakespeare in Love), Charles Moore (Schindler's List)[clarification needed] and Shan Moodley and is directed by Nogueira.

[76] Also in 2011, South African musician Chris Chameleon released an album of Jonker's works, entitled As Jy Weer Skryf ("If You Write Again").

In 2012, Nicola Haskins choreographed a dance drama which told the life story of Jonker for the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and then later to be performed at various venues including the University of Pretoria.

This book contains new insights into the poet's life, and includes love letters (some unsent) and an as yet unpublished account of the night of Jonker's death by her friend, Bonnie Davidtsz.