WRITER: ATHOL WILLIAMS
Throughout his short life, exiled South African poet, Arthur Nortje suffered a deep sense of alienation and abandonment. He could not consider South Africa his home since, as a coloured person under Apartheid in the 1950’s and 1960’s, he was treated as an outcast and suffered great torment. Similarly, when he arrived in England in 1965, he discovered that here too he would be regarded as an outsider. He cut a lonely figure.
I only recently came to know about Arthur Nortje, hearing about him from Selwyn Milborrow, a journalist and publisher in Port Elizabeth earlier this year. While some academic articles have been written about his Nortje’s poetry, not much has been written about the details of his life while he lived in England. I was immediately struck by Nortje’s story because of the many similarities with my own. I too am a coloured poet who suffered under apartheid, and seeking better opportunities, travelled to England in my twenties. Like Nortje I was still living in England at the age of 27, the age at which he died. Nortje shuttled between England and Canada, I shuttled between England and the US. We both kept journals and used our poetry to express our anguish and to explore our identity. And we both studied at Oxford University. Exactly 50 years after he did, I arrived at Oxford where I continue to be as a doctoral candidate. Being here, therefore, offered me the perfect opportunity to investigate Nortje’s life or at least the part of his life that he spent here. What were the circumstances under which he lived and studied? Where did he hang out? What were his interests? And importantly, what were the circumstances around his mysterious death on 11 December 1970? I decided to work backwards, to start with his grave, then his funeral and then begin to piece the story together. It was widely believed among those who have studied Nortje, that he was buried somewhere in Oxford in an unmarked grave. Even so, I was determined to find the grave.
After extensive online searches and emails, I managed to find someone in the Oxford City Council willing to do some digging. She went through the handwritten records in the archives from 1970 and found an entry for Arthur Nortje. She told me that he was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery section B3. As it turned out, the cemetery was just a short bus ride from my home in Oxford. At the cemetery, I found the section B3 which looked like it consisted of a few hundred graves. I do not enjoy cemeteries so quickly set about my search. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I walked slowly along every row looking at the name on the gravestone. Many graves were in bad condition, some were overgrown, others badly damaged. There were a number of graves where names could not be read owing to damage or weathering and some graves did appear unmarked, just a patch of grass or some stones.
As I walked down the rows and rows of graves I began to suspect that perhaps Nortje was indeed buried in one of those unmarked or damaged graves. After all, why would others report this to be the case and why were there no electronic records of the location of his grave. I shuffled along, reading out names as I went, the cold English wind ripping at my cheeks, and then I stopped. I couldn’t breathe. There it was, a small stone with the words:
ARTHUR NORTJE
1942-1970
SOUTH AFRICAN POET
Arthur Nortje 
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