Totius

Totius (TOE-she-us) was the pen name of the Afrikaner poet Jakob Daniël du Toit (Yah-kob Dun-ee-el doo-Toy) (born 21 February 1877 in Paarl, near Cape Town in South Africa, died 1 July 1953, in Pretoria).

The poet D.J. Opperman (Awper-mun) compiled brief biographical notes ref |Opperman in Afrikaans about Totius/du Toit. Du Toit was educated in a German mission school and at the Hugenot Memorial School at Daljosafat in the Cape and later attended a theological college at Burgersdorp before becoming a military chaplain with the Boer Commandos during the Second Boer War. After the war, he studied at the Free University in Amsterdam and was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Theology ref|schirmer . He became an ordained minister of the Reformed Church of South Africa and from 1911 he was a professor at the Theological College of this Reformed Church in Potchefstroom. As a mature man he travelled to the Netherlands and Palestine and his impressions of these visits to foreign lands are included in the collection "Skemering" (1948). (The word Skemering is a pun and difficult to translate. It can relate to "Twilight" but also to "feint recollection").

Du Toit was a deeply religious man and a conservative one in most senses, including political. He was an Afrikaner patriot and he was influential in using his interpretation of the Bible as a justification of the underlying principles of apartheid.

His small son died at a tender age of an infection and his young daughter was killed by lightning, falling into his arms dead as she ran towards him. He recorded this calamity in the poem "O die pyn-gedagte" (literally "O the pain-thoughts").

Du Toit was responsible for much of the translation of the Bible into Afrikaans, finishing what his father Stephanus Jacobus du Toit had begun. He also put a huge amount of work into producing poetical versions of the Psalms in Afrikaans. His poetry was in the main lyrical and dealt, inter alia, with faith, nature, British imperialism and the Afrikaner nation. He left behind many collections of poems, including "Trekkerswee" (1915; “Trekkers' Grief”) and "Passieblomme" (1934; “Passion Flowers”).

References

# (1) Opperman, D.J. Undated; probably 1962. Senior Verseboek. Nationale Boekhandel Bpk, Kaapstad. Negende Druk, 185pp. Translation for Wikipedia by J.W. Marchant 2005.
# (2) Schirmer, P. 1980. The concise illustrated South African Encyclopaedia. Central News Agency, Johannesburg. First edition, about 211pp.

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