Jan F.E. Celliers

Jan F.E. Celliers (1865-1940) was an Afrikaans author and playwright.

Also referred to as Jan F. Celliers, and on occasion as Jan F.E. Cilliers by some sources.

Biography

Born Jan Francois Elias Celliers near Wellington in the Western Cape on 12 January 1865, he grew up near Cape Town. In in 1874 the Celliers family to Pretoria, in the then Republic of the Transvaal.

When the Second Boer War broke out, Celliers fought on the Boer side, inter alia at Colesberg, until the end of the war. Escaping through British lines wearing his wife's clothes, Celliers went to Europe, where he stayed until his 1907 return to South Africa.

Celliers was one of the three outstanding Afrikaans-language poets who wrote in the immediate wake of the Second Boer War; together with Totius and C. Louis Leipoldt, Celliers' youthful poetry writes of the devastation of the war in the youthful language of Afrikaans. His best poems appear in the 1908 collection Die Vlakte en ander gedigte ("The Plains and Other Poems).

From 1919 to 1940 Celliers was a professor at Stellenbosch University.

He died in Johannesburg on 1 June 1940.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

A member of the management of the AHTV and founder member of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. Not exceptionally successful as playwright, but like most of his time wrote to create and supply the new Afrikaans literature with a canon of serious works.

His plays include Liefde en Plig (“Love and Duty”- 1909), Martje (1911), Heldinne van die Oorlog (“Heroines of the War” – a commissioned work for the inauguration of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein in 1913, pub. 1924) and Reg bo Reg (“Right above [before] Right”- 1922).

In 1893 he also recited a dramatic piece called Jan Onverschillig ("Careless John") at a meeting of the Rederykerskamer Onze Taal, in Pretoria.

[JH/TH]