Private Life
JG Strijdom was known for being very dedicated, absolutely honest and incorruptible, but also stubborn and not open for change of course. He was nicknamed The Lion of the North, because he could be rather frightening as a political opponent.
He was briefly married to the actress Margaretha van Hulsteyn, but they divorced within a year. His second wife was Susan de Klerk, aunt of future President F W de Klerk. Two children were born to Strijdom by his second wife, Johannes and Estelle. Susan Strijdom died in 1999 and Estelle (Crowson) in 2009.
There are still various monuments dedicated to him in South Africa. One monument in central Pretoria, which featured his bust, collapsed in 2001 injuring two people. His house in Modimolle (formerly Nylstroom) is now a museum, which holds parts of the collapsed bust. Perhaps most notably the Hillbrow Tower in Johannesburg was officially named the J.G. Strijdom Tower until 1995 shortly after the conclusion of apartheid when it was renamed the Telkom Hillbrow Tower.
In the western suburb of Johannesburg, i.e. the suburb of Weltevreeden Park, there is a road named JG Strijdom Road, which is named after him.
Read more about this topic: Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom
Famous quotes containing the words private life, private and/or life:
“There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.”
—Ralph J. Cudworth (1617–1688)
“All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.”
—Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)