Anastasia de Vries and Yves T’Sjoen at SASNEV
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Dear colleagues and students
I am honoured to pay tribute to Anastasia de Vries in the setting of the Ghent Colloquium. We had been looking forward to learning from Anastasia’s enormous experience and wide-ranging expertise. In her absence, I wish to take a moment to celebrate the life of a remarkable colleague and teacher.
After her sudden passing, Anastasia’s students at UWC contributed testimonies to LitNet, in which they celebrated her stimulating role as a lecturer in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch. They recalled her warmth and the profound influence she had not only on their studies, but also on their lives. Each student’s contribution is a gripping testimony about an exceptional lecturer and writer and, above all, a charming person who made lives possible. They provide a picture of who Anastasia was and how she touched people through her voice, her personality and the ideas she conveyed. Each memoir illustrates how Anastasia made an impact on students’ lives.
I had the privilege of conducting what might have been Anastasia’s last public interview. At the request of the South African Centre for the Netherlands and Flanders, I invited Anastasia to participate in the “Bridgeheads” interview series, in which authors and cultural agents discussed the mediating role of writers and academic lecturers between Afrikaans and Dutch. Anastasia was a vibrant interlocutor. She was smart and astute, articulate and critical, impressively knowledgeable, engaged, and beloved by her students and colleagues.
In the interview, which is still available on Sasnev’s YouTube channel, Anastasia spoke about her empathic way of teaching, how she could inspire, intellectually stimulate and keep students engaged.
A slight, unimposing figure
She also talked about her dreams for her post-university life. Anastasia dreamed of launching a business as a dressmaker for larger women. Herself a slight, unimposing figure, she expressed deep empathy for women who did not fit the norms of contemporary fashion. This was typical of Anastasia the thinker and the teacher: she was a woman who recognised the struggles of those around her and sought to work not only towards solutions, but also towards a recalibration of what we might regard as a problem.
Anastasia was witty and incisive, especially with regard to the way the story of Afrikaans is told in South Africa. She represented a critical voice, unafraid to engage in debate, and bringing forth a different, less predictable perspective than what we usually hear in academic circles. Unintentionally, that candid conversation at Sasnev in Pinelands, Cape Town, became Anastasia's testament. For those who are interested, Willem de Vries wrote a detailed report on that final conversation, titled “Bridgeheads: Anastasia de Vries makes pivotal contributions in critical re-evaluation of languages, history and communities”. It is published on the website of Voertaal.
Anastasia’s passing is an enormous loss for Afrikaans literature. We lose a colleague with a critical pen; a sharp mind; a writer and lecturer who was perceptive but also sensitive and willing to listen; someone who could speak compellingly and convincingly about her students, the community she came from, and those who had been denied a voice. She was a significant voice in the debate about Afrikaans, and a passionate and feminist respondent to conservative opinions among white, heteropatriarchal Afrikaners.
Anastasia was an exceptional, involved lecturer. She was active as a columnist, and known as a multi-award-winning journalist, among others in her regular contributions to Vrye Weekblad. She viewed her journalistic work as a way to find solutions to problems, a way to reach a larger audience and hopefully to change people’s thinking. Through her columns, she consciously paid attention to the kinds of stories that don’t make the front pages. She talked about the equally important stories of care and compassion in communities that exist largely outside the news pages. I consider her contributions especially important as a voice for and from a community, noting how Afrikaans currently develops as a literary idiolect, as a literary language, and specifically as a language of communities that have made it their own today.
Marni Bonthuys, Anastasia de Vries, Steward van Wyk and Yves T’Sjoen at UWC
About her Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at UWC, she said: “I think it has to do with us being very aware that we come from the same circumstances as our students. And we give back.”
This was Anastasia’s motto: “I feel that it is my task to prepare a younger generation to take my place.”
She believed that Dutch and Afrikaans could be the domain of black people, and she worked to help her students reach that conclusion, too. Anastasia was a bridge between literature, language and the everyday lives of those most often neglected by the academy.
We miss her.
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This memorial for Anastasia de Vries was delivered on 20 November 2024 at the start of the conference “Horizons of political/poetical contestation: South African intersectional perspectives across disciplines and languages” (Ghent University and Ghent Centre for Afrikaans and the Study of South Africa).
- Translation and photographs by Juliana M Pistorius
Tributes to Anastasia de Vries
Hoe Juffrou se woorde my lewe gered het: "Djy doenit’ie vi my nie, Troubles."
Ek wens sy was my dosent ook gewees – dankie vir als, Anastasia
Sy was ’n vrou van kleur en ’n vrou van kleure: ’n Elegie vir Anastasia de Vries
