The poet D.J. Opperman compiled brief biographical notes in Afrikaans about Totius/du Toit. Du Toit began his education at the Huguenot Memorial School at Daljosafat in the Cape. He then moved to a German mission school named Morgensonne near Rustenburg from 1888 to 1890 before returning, between 1890 and 1894, to his original school at Daljosafat. Later he attended a theological college at Burgersdorp before becoming a military chaplain with the Boer Commandos during the Second Boer War. After the war, he studied at the Free University in Amsterdam and was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Theology. He became an ordained minister of the Reformed Church of South Africa and from 1911 he was a professor at the Theological College of this Reformed Church inPotchefstroom. As a mature man he travelled to the Netherlands and Palestine and his impressions of these visits to foreign lands are included in the collection Skemering.. Du Toit was a deeply religious man and a conservative one in most senses. His small son died of an infection and his young daughter, Wilhelmina, was killed by lightning, falling into his arms dead as she ran towards him. He recorded this calamity in the poem "O die pyn-gedagte". Du Toit was responsible for much of the translation of the Bible into Afrikaans, finishing what his father Stephanus Jacobus du Toit had begun. He also put a huge amount of work into producing poetical versions of the Psalms in Afrikaans. His poetry was in the main lyrical and dealt, inter alia, with faith, nature, British imperialism and the Afrikaner nation. He left behind many collections of poems, including Trekkerswee and Passieblomme. He was on the committee that founded Potchefstroom Gimnasium in 1907 and chancellor of the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, from 1951-1953.
His poetry
One of the poems from Skemering was translated by C.J.D Harvey as follows: Another poem, from Passieblomme, translated by J.W. Marchant:
Honors and recognition
Du Toit has been honored by his face on a South Africanpostage stamp in 1977. In 1977, a statue of Totius by the sculptor Jo Roos was placed in the Totius Garden of Remembrance, in Potchefstroom. The statue was restored by Roos in 2009, and moved to the Potchefstroom Campus of North-West University. It was removed in 2015 at the request of the Reformed Churches of South Africa, after consultation with the Du Toit family, with the intention of instead displaying it on RCSA property.
