My Brother & I

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Driver’s life was full of searching and longing, for South Africa, and in particular his beloved Karoo. The joy he felt at the coming to power in the mid-1990s of Nelson Mandela and the ANC evaporated in his latter years, when it became clear that the ANC had lost its way. This is all narrated in an easy but expressive jargon-free style with a great deal of humour, much of it directed at the author himself and a picture emerges of someone whom we can unreservedly admire and not only because of his opposition to apartheid, something the author barely mentions. Jonty Driver is not only an idealist, as I said, but one whose idealism is tempered by an underpinning of pragmatism. Although Driver spent several decades living abroad in England, his early life in South Africa always remained a key focus in his writing and he was an active participant and supportive presence in the local literary community. He will live on in his written works and the memories of family and friends. At the time, Mandela had retired in some triumph after serving a single term as president of the supposed ’new South Africa’ – which I found hugely ironic, seeing that, not too long before, at a stage-managed provincial and local farmers’ union meeting, ostensibly about farm labour, I was singled out as a farmer in league with ‘the devil’. But I digress … As of November 2019, Driver was a full-time writer, though he continued his involvement in education.

Some Schools, a memoir covering the years 1964-2000 and Jonty's work as a teacher and headmaster in five very different schools, was published by John Catt Ltd in 2016 and is Omdraaivlei", "A Game of Tennis" and "Puppets"), and four poems in No 396 (April 2018): "Last Lesson of a Wintry Afternoon: a Kaddich for Joanna, Lady Seldon", "Extract from a Diary", "Diary Entry"His father, an Anglican priest as had been his grandfather before him, nurtured in him a strong sense of justice, a passion for the development of young minds, hearts, and bodies. Even at sixty Jonty was still to be found “flailing”, as his distinct running style was called, around a school playing field. He also had deep literary interests which he shared with his sister Dorothy, professor of English successively at UCT and Adelaide University, and her husband, the Nobel Literature Laureate, JM Coetzee. His success in all his posts has been achieved by knowing what he wanted to accomplish linked with a clear awareness of the compromises that might be necessary to arrive at the desired goal. Helping this clarity of mind was a strong and persuasive personality which took others with him

In 2000 Driver retired from Wellington and eventually settled with Ann in a delightful old cottage at Northiam, near Rye in East Sussex. The house displayed another of the paradoxes that were always present in his life: an unusually tall man fitting himself comfortably into a low-ceilinged cottage, as if he had clambered into a dolls’ house overflowing with books. The schools are: Sevenoaks (1964-5, 1967-73), Matthew Humberstone Comprehensive School (1973-8), Island School, Hong Kong (1978-83), Berkhamsted School (1983-9), and Wellington CollegeThe advent of democracy made possible a return to the nation that had retained his name on a list of banned persons until the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and other anti-apartheid organisations made return possible. In response to this completion of what was almost a biblical trajectory of departure and return for so many, he wrote voraciously, not simply evoking but immersing himself anew in the landscape that had been such a crucial part of his hinterland from his earliest years and which was nowsinging a song of freedom for him and his contemporaries not one of persistent misery and injustice. This all elicited his very best poetry. Whether in freer form iambic pentameter or sonnet or haiku, he achieved an ebullience on the one hand and a poignancy on the other that made his one of the most compelling voices writing in English in the period since the end of apartheid. Charles Jonathan Driver was born on August 19 1939 at Mowbray, a suburb of Cape Town, to Phyllis, née Gould, and Kingsley (“Jos”) Driver. He was born into schools. His father, after time as a prisoner of war, having been captured at Tobruk in North Africa, became chaplain at St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, which his son would later describe as “the Eton of South Africa“. SOME SCHOOLS, described as a "professional memoir", was published by John Catt Educational Ltd in September 2016. It is an 80,000 word account of the various schools Jonty Driver worked in after The translator and facilitator was a charismatic young teacher, Sizwe Dyasi, then a popular figure at the school and among the town’s young people in general. At the time, Jonty remarked: ‘That young man deserves a good future.” Whether or not this has come to pass is of course yet another story. Novelist, poet, and educationalist Jonty Driver died at the age of 83 in Bristol, England on 21 May. Charles Jonathan ‘Jonty’ Driver was born in Cape Town in 1939 and attended St. Andrews College in Makhanda (where his father served as chaplain). His sister, Dorothy Driver, JM Coetzee’s partner, worked at the then National English Literary Museum (Amazwi’s former name), with their mother working at Rhodes University.