The Roots Beneath the Name

From Dust and Discipline: The Story of Jacoba Johanna Viljoen

Jacoba Johanna Viljoen was not born into comfort. She was born into endurance, the quiet, inherited kind that passes from mother to daughter through stories seldom told aloud.

Her father's mother had survived a British concentration camp during the Second Anglo-Boer War. While her grandmother's siblings perished, she had survived by eating beetles and bark, refusing to die in captivity. From her, the will to survive became family blood.

Dora Magdaleen Engelbrecht grew up under the weight of the memory of the previous generation, and married Johan Viljoen, a teacher-farmer who could be both visionary and volatile. Together they raised five daughters between Benoni and Heidelberg, later Lydenburg, on a smallholding where hardship was the constant teacher.

Jacoba, born in 1947, found her refuge in books. She spent long hours in the farm school library, hiding from noise and anger, reading herself into other worlds. “To read,” she would later say, “was to breathe.”

Her father’s temper shaped her silence; her mother’s faith shaped her resilience. Between those two poles — fear and faith — she learned the paradox that would define her life: that suffering, when held to the light, could become strength.

Education was her rebellion, quiet but fierce.

Faith was her compass.

And both would one day take her far beyond the borders of South Africa.