Sydney Vernon Petersen

Sydney Vernon Petersen was born in 1914 in Riversdale, a town in the south of the Western Cape Province of South Africa. He was the second child in a family of five children; his father a harness maker by profession. Motivated mainly by their mother all of the children obtained, at lease, their degree in Education. Petersen visited the local Berlin Mission School, completing his schooling in Cape Town at the Trafalgar High School. He excelled in athletics and sports throughout his student days. During his final year in high school a pastor of the Lutheran Mission Church, he felt, had a particularly good influence on his personal development. He began his teacher training in the early 1930s at the Battswood Training College in Wynberg, Cape Town and accepted his first teaching post in Ladismith. He returned to Cape Town to further his studies in Afrikaans, English and mathematics putting himself through university by teaching in the Berlin Mission School in District Six. In 1982 he was appointed to the SABC Board.

After graduating, he became head of the Battswood Training College and in 1947 founding principal of Athlone High School, from which he retired in 1975. Petersen undertook several trips abroad, visiting the Netherlands, England and America where he gave lectures on education and literature.

He died at the age of 73 after a brief illness at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.

Petersen began writing poetry in elementary school. Although known best as a poet, he began his writing career with short stories and sketches that were published in newspapers and magazines. From 1940 his pieces were included in Afrikaans magazines like Naweek, Suid-Afrika and Die Huisgenoot. Between 1944 and 1965 he published six volumes of poetry and a novel.

The poet, who in terms of South Africa's racial laws, belonged to the Coloured population, suffered throughout his life from the fact that, by virtue of its origin, he was classified as a second-class citizen. Residential segregation, prohibition of mixed marriages and the daily discrimination left him feeling deeply wounded. With his collections Die Enkeling (The Individual) and Die stil kind en ander verse (The Quiet Child and Other Poems) he was one of the first poets who took on the lot of our Coloured fellow human beings. He spoke it as the accursed punishment of a dark skin. His novel As die son ondergaan (When the Sun Goes Down) is about a young man from the Coloured community trying to find his fortune in Cape Town. After a hiatus of some 12 years, Petersen published four collections of poetry in which the resistance is stronger against racial discrimination. In his final collection, Laat kom dan die wind (Late Comes the Wind), he goes visits places from the past, which have played a role in his life. Meditations on the brink: dedicated with reverence to the life-work of Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven was published in the Netherlands in 1962. Alleenstryd (The Lonely Struggle) is an anthology compiled by Petersen himself.