The farm boy who made something from nothing

more and talk less. So it was with a casual ease that John said to his family he was going to have to build a house for him and Cheryl. It would be next door to his family home in Kingston Street, where their first two children, Ulreich and Beauregard, would be born. Having children was a great joy to John, especially. From the two Tromps who had come from St Helena nearly a century before, there were few descendents. Through children a man’s name, a testimony to the fact that he walked this earth, would remain.

Tiervlei was a place where migrants from the harsh, unforgiving interior had migrated, where communities that had been torn apart were thrown together, and violence seemed inevitable. It bothered John, this raising of a family here, and he was soon looking elsewhere. He found a place, in the then fledgling township of Belhar, a stone’s throw from his other great love, PenTech.

Maybe in a nod to his transitory upbringing, John built a house that never seemed complete. This was his home, where he and Cheryl would raise their family.

With an insatiable appetite for work and a natural aversion to sloth, John remained restless, always tinkering, visiting family and friends and pulling in all forms of other income streams to supplement his and Cheryl’s teaching salaries.

Living frugally, he tried to instil that iron discipline he believed would prepare his children for the unrelenting world that awaited them. Neighbours’ kids knew that John Tromp, with belt in hand, was not averse to treating them like one of his own. For the rest of the Tromp family, now raising so many more Trompies and Groenewalds and Sliers in this urban sprawl, John seemed best equipped to deal with the administration that came with Die Kaap, and he increasingly took on the mantle of patriarch.

In keeping with what was expected of a Tromp, he remained humble, effusive, often even reluctant, as he was called upon to deal with everything from taxes to education and threats to family unity. His children chose partners of their own, had children of their own and a chance for a grey, balding, paunchy older man to delight in being a grandfather. “The best, best thing about getting old,” he said two years ago.

The years rolled by and the country changed and John’s ingrained fear of not being able to provide enough abated. He read more – the biographies of heroes like Dr Martin Luther King Jr. And he learnt to be swayed and allow other points of view to take precedence over his. And as he withdrew from the world of teaching and turned to wellpoints and irrigation, a return you may say to the earth, his restless spirit eased and he found peace.

The Tromps are a family who will readily admit that they’re not emotive people. Perhaps their trajectory, as migrant workers and being pushed, prodded and kicked out left little room for such delicacies. Life was hard. John Tromp yearned for tenderness though and found it with his wife, a woman who wears her heart on her sleeve and had a family and cousins that John reveled in spending time with.

John Tromp hardly ever spoke of his past. When asked he’d simply reply: “Why?” He saw no point in looking back or allowing an opportunity for wallowing in historical injustice.

“I’m so proud of that farm child. I’d like my children to hear one day what John Tromp achieved, from nothing,” said a sister of his recently.

John Tromp’s story is intertwined with that of his people and a time and a place at times unique and sometimes all too familiar to some. He lived longer than some of us expected him to. But that was in keeping with the man, a man who would be so much more than the sum of all the events that tried to shape him.

Time for a Bath.