The maternal side has its own naming-echo story — quieter than the Retief spine’s, but just as deliberate.
Sophia Wilhelmina Jacoba van Niekerk (b. 3 November 1890, Riversdale) is the daughter of Johan Wilhelm Albertus van Niekerk (1864–1938). She married Jacobus Lodewyk van Zyl at Albertinia in 1907, and thirteen years later gave birth to her youngest child.
She named him — and this is the point — Johan Wilhelm Albertus. The whole three-name block of her father, preserved intact.
That youngest son is Johan Wilhelm Albertus van Zyl (b. 22 February 1920), Attie’s maternal grandfather. He was named for the maternal grandfather he barely knew — Johan Wilhelm the elder was already 56 when he was born, and 74 when he died in 1938. The child would have been eighteen.
The pattern is exactly the reverse of the Retief spine’s naming echo: that one carries a paternal name straight down the surname line. This one carries a grandfather’s Christian names across a surname change (van Niekerk → van Zyl), one generation delayed. Two different mechanisms; same underlying instinct — hold the name.
And this is how the 1942 driver’s licence becomes so tightly anchored: the twenty-two-year-old man in that photograph is carrying, in his own name, the memory of a grandfather who had been dead only four years.