A legend in his lifetime

LINDEN – On his 100th birthday Oupa John Selier ate cake and drank a glass of grape juice and sat back in his easy chair in the Claasen family home in Linden.

In previous years Oupa – as his family and friends affectionately call him – was a nuclear-physicist and built the famous cyclotron in Pretoria, a particle accelerator in which charged particles accelerate outwards from the centre along a spiral path. Now he’s happy to sit back and eat cake, and the only thing he occasionally demands haltingly, is a cup of coffee.

Oupa John was 35 when he came to South Africa from Holland on the ship the Klipfontein, which sunk off the Mozambican coastline two years later.

“He spent everything he had to come to South Africa,” his daughter Elize Claasen said on 24 July, the day after Oupa had celebrated his centennial existence on earth.

“He told us we had left everything behind, and that we were now South Africans. He immediately made us learn Afrikaans. Soon we couldn’t even speak Dutch anymore. We were South Africans, and that was that.”

In his hey-days, Oupa was accomplished at almost everything he laid his hands on. And he was indeed very hands-on. He played the organ, directed the church choir, worked with copper and wood, crafted furniture and trinkets, painted and even knotted carpets. “He was never not working on something,” Claasen said fondly.

Oupa was lucky enough to avoid going to war. “He was too short to join up in World War II,” his daughter explained.

“You had to be five foot five to enlist, and Oupa was only five foot four and a half. But he had his share of war experience in Holland. He was hiding from the Nazi’s once, and on one day after evading them, he went to his home and went into the back door just as they left his home by way of the front door. He promptly went upstairs to the attic and rolled himself into a carpet, and spent hours hiding there.”

Nowadays, the only thing that bothers Oupa is the occasional barking of the family German shepherd, Keiser. “Sometimes Oupa says ‘Miaow’ when Keiser barks,” Oupa’s nurse Talita said with a smile.

After years of living healthily on his own, Oupa’s health deteriorated and he was relocated to Linden to live with his family two years ago. He used to live in Pretoria with his wife Alie, who died in 2002.

Linden is a wonderful place, the Claasens say. They’ve been living here for 35 years and say almost every moment in the suburb was a happy one.

“Oupa was remarkably clear-headed and happy on his birthday on the 23th. And this weekend, the whole family will be congregating here to celebrate his birthday,” Claasen said.