Totius

Jacob Daniël du Toit (21 February 1877 – 1 July 1953), known by the pseudonym Totius, was a South African Afrikaner poet, minister, theologian, translator and professor.

Life

Jacob Daniël du Toit was born on the 21 February 1877 in Paarl, Cape Colony (present-day, South Africa) to Elizabeth Jacoba Joubert and Stephanus Jacobus du Toit, the leader of the First Afrikaans language movement.

The poet D.J. Opperman compiled brief biographical notes[1] in Afrikaans about Du Toit. Du Toit began his education at the Huguenot Memorial School at Daljosafat in the Cape (1883–1885). He then moved to a German mission school named Morgensonne near Rustenburg from 1888 to 1890 before returning, between 1890 and 1894, to his original school at Daljosafat. Later he 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 received a Doctor of Theology degree.[2] 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. On the celebration of his sixtieth birthday, Totius was honoured throughout South Africa. On the behalf of the nation, the FAK presented him with a Van Wouw-statuette as a token of gratitude for his work as a poet, Bible translator, cultural leader and academic. He also received a travel grant which enabled him and his wife to visit the Biblical countries and Europe. 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 be interpreted as "twilight" but also as "faint recollection"). In the same year, he also received honorary doctorates upon him by the University of Stellenbosch and the Gemeentelike Universiteit, Amsterdam.