Uys Krige

Mattheus Uys Krige : He was a South African writer, poet , playwright , translator, rugby player, and war correspondent.

Summary

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• 1 Childhood and Youth
• 2 Participation in World War II
• 3 After the War
• 4 Some of his Works
  • 1 Poems
  • 2 Novels
  • 3 Travel books and war correspondence
  • 4 Theater plays
• 5 Sources

Childhood and Youth

Mattheus Uys Krige was born on February 4, 1910 in South Africa. He was the second son of Jacob Krige and Susanna Uys, people very involved in the community of which they were part.

His father was a talented athlete, cricketer and tennis player. He played professional rugby and toured Great Britain and France . He became a lawyer and was known for his fair verdicts and his insight into human nature.

His mother, a teacher by profession, played the piano and had a clear literary talent that she revealed at a late stage in her life by publishing some stories .

Mattheus showed potential as a writer from an early age and at just fifteen, he was already contributing English prose and Afrikaans poetry to important publications in his country .

Influenced by his father’s occupation he studied law at Stellenbosch University. After graduating he moved to Johannesburg and a year later he went to Europe.

He settled in Provence , France and played rugby for the Toulon club , the most prestigious in France at the time as it had won the 1930 and 1931 national championships . Outside of rugby season, he kept afloat with a variety of odd jobs, as a dishwasher at a Monte Carlo restaurant and extra in a movie. During this period, he also wrote regularly, often in bars and restaurants, and submitted articles on Provençal life to the South African press.

The Great Depression of the 1930s took hold of Europe and financial problems arose that forced Krige to move to Barcelona in late November of 1933 .

Krige’s time in Spain was significant to him for a number of reasons, not least because he discovered himself as a prose and theater writer .

He returned to South Africa in December 1935 , four and a half years after his arrival in Europe and just six months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War . He settled in Cape Town and met Lydia Lindeque, a promising actress from Johannesburg , whom he married on January 27 , 1937 .

Participation in World War II

Krige watched international politics with growing concern. He opposed his country’s participation in a war in which tens of thousands of South Africans would die and the population would have new reasons for “gratitude” to Great Britain .

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 had alerted him to the dangers posed by fascism , and he greatly sympathized with the Spanish population. Furthermore, he realized that Mussolini had been a powerful figure in Italy since 1922 , and that support for fascism in Germany had only increased since Hitler came to power in 1933. Through Spain, he saw that fascism could lead to the destruction of Western values, and that the future of democracy in Europe was being threatened, which is why he became involved as a correspondent in World War II .

In late 1939, the president of South Africa appointed Krige as the director of an Afrikaans station from which he broadcast both the fall of the Netherlands and the collapse of France. His opposition to Nazi Germany brought it to the public notice and the nationalist press reacted strongly to his views. He was ridiculed in a series of headlines and his “Afrikanerdom” was called into question, as a “true Afrikaner” would not support Britain.

In June 1940 , Mussolini’s entry into the war extended the conflict to African territory and Krige, who had no military training, requested to be sent to the front as a war correspondent. He was taken prisoner on November 23, and because of his knowledge of European languages, he quickly became a leader among the prisoners, many of whom gratefully declared that had it not been for his help their situation would have been worse.

Thereafter, Krige spent most of the two years in a prisoner-of-war camp at Sulmona , central Italy . While in the camp, he learned Italian, and by reading five or six Italian newspapers a day, he compiled and issued an English newspaper for the camp. This paper raised morale among men and from its pages predicted, for example, that Stalingrad would not fall.

It is evident from his personal correspondence and writings that his war experiences had a profound impact on him as an individual and became a turning point in his life. Furthermore, with regard to his convictions about the war, Krige clearly refused to follow the line held by many of his contemporaries. When South Africa entered the war on the side of the Allies , Krige was one of three prominent Afrikaans authors, along with the Dutch Jan van Melle and the veteran poet Christian Louis Leipoldt , who declared themselves resolutely opposed to Hitler .

After the war

Thereafter, Krige settled in Johannesburg and conducted a series of interviews, lectures, speeches, and radio broadcasts focused on his wartime experiences. He also published a series of works related to this period, including El camino de la fuga, an autobiography. Here, he provided details of his escape and the numerous occasions on which he received help from the Italian population while fleeing the Germans and seeking out Allied forces. In August of 1944 , Krige returned to Cairo to continue working as a war correspondent. Extensively travel to a variety of countries before finally returning to South Africa in March of 1946 .

The Krige war reports are significant for several reasons. First, it must be understood in context. He voiced his allied support and views against the Nazis at a time when most Afrikaans speakers held a different opinion. In addition, he tried to influence the public to see the situation from his perspective, sometimes to the detriment of his career or reputation. He realized the seriousness of the conflict and its consequences for the future and tried to communicate it to his audience. He was unwilling to dismiss the conflict as merely European in nature, as did many of his contemporaries. Instead, he viewed it as “something that affects the whole world, all of humanity.” He believed he was in the middle of a “universal tragedy” and part of a struggle that ”

However, he did not allow his rejection of fascism to turn into hatred of the individuals who adhered to that ideology. On the contrary, his writings frequently contain details that present humanity to the “enemy” and the war situation, showing cases of kindness and compassion between opposing sides. For Krige, however, the “enemy” was never nations or individuals, but ideologies and ideas.

Perhaps his views on the war can be summarized in the following quote from Joseph, a character who would appear in his drama Wall of Death (1968):

“You can’t really hate people, at the most you can hate their thoughts and ideas ..… Actually, you should love people, this way, it will be easier for you to understand them.”

He died in the South African city of Hermanus, in the Western Cape, when he was seventy-seven years old.

Some of his Works

Poems

• Change, 1935.
• Red day, 1940.
• Poems of War, 1942.
• Heart without a port, 1949.
• Ballad of Great Desire, 1960.
• The evening before, 1964.

Novels

• The palm tree, 1940.
• The dream and the desert, 1953.

Travel books and war correspondence

• The way out, 1946.
• Sun and Shadow, 1948.
• Far from the world, 1951.
• The Salt of the Earth, 1961.

Theater plays

• Magdalena Retief, 1938.
• The Golden Circle, 1956.
• The White Wall, 1940.
• All roads lead to Rome, 1949.
• The sniper, 1951.