Melanie Verwoerd’s dad died this past week. She says goodbye to him in this moving tribute.
My dad died suddenly a few days ago.
He wasn’t always my dad, but he became my dad.
I have a vague memory of the first time Philip came to me and my mum’s flat and took her out for dinner. On my three-and-a-half year old memory, that made a big impact.
When they got married a few months later, I was not in a good mood. I didn’t object to the marriage, in fact I was excited. However, my mum dressed me in a (very fashionable at the time) knitted pant suit. I wanted to wear a dress. When my original plans to boycott the wedding didn’t work, I resorted to glaring at the photographer in all the wedding photographs.
A year later, he was the one who brought me to the gardens of the Moedersbond Hospital in Pretoria and pointed out the window where my mum was standing with my new little sister (children were not allowed to visit).
Shortly after, my mum asked if I would mind calling him “dad”. I didn’t mind and so effortlessly we became a family.
My biological dad sucked at fatherhood. In a world where he was either absent or created chaos, Philip provided the quiet, constant safety that all kids need.
Philip was a genius. He had a phenomenal intellect. He was sixteen years old when he went to university and a few years later got a doctorate in nuclear physics. He speed-read a few books a day. Dinners and lunches at our house were always filled with deeply – sometimes heated – intellectual conversations. Lazy thinking was not an option – a huge gift to any child.
As a lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch in Applied Mathematics, he was deeply committed to his students. Teaching was important to him – also with his children. He spent hours reading books and teaching chess to my sisters and when we asked him a question he would get the relevant book and give us a passage to read. If we thought that we could take a mathematic short cut by asking him to do a calculation for us, he would insist that we did it ourselves and report back how we got to the answer.
Over the last few years he mentored young students to get their academic articles published.
But he was also willing to learn.
On the day of the 1994 election, I went home for a quick dinner between political responsibilities. We got involved in a heated discussion and I (with all the arrogance of my youth) challenged him to step out of the comfort of intellectualism and to rather get involved and do something.
A few months later, some of the ANC people in his area told me how impressed they were with my dad. Unbeknown to me, he had joined the local RDP forum and was playing a huge role there. That led to his involvement with various NGOs – to the point that the endless phone calls from people who were looking for “comrade” Philip drove my mum crazy.
His deep interest in current affairs continued right to the end. A few days before his death he called me and raised his deep concern about the effect of the Covid-19 epidemic on the country and especially the economy.
Despite Philip’s intellectualism, there was also a deep emotional and soft side to him. One of my lasting memories is of him sitting on our childhood beds and gently stroking our backs until we fell asleep.
On the morning of his death he stroked my mum’s back just before he got up to juice some oranges for her.
These loving deeds for his wife of 49 years were the last things he did before his phenomenal brain started bleeding.
Philip du Toit Fourie was my dad… my real dad.
And now I have to say goodbye.
Thank you dad, for taking me on – I know it could not have been easy. Thank you for making my life stable and safe. Thank you for walking me down the aisle when I got married and being there for all the important days in my life. Thank you for being (furiously) on my side when I got divorced. Thank you for being such a proud and loving grandfather to my children.
And thank you for being such a good husband to my mum – for making her happy again and giving her faith in life after her first marriage.
I will miss you terribly.
– Melanie Verwoerd is a former ANC MP and South African Ambassador to Ireland
See www.melanieverwoerd.co.za
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