André Laubscher, the actor who played "Trompie," the mischievous gang leader, in the movie is now a medical doctor in the town of Ceres, which is the administrative centre and largest town of the Witzenberg Local Municipality in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Population 33,224 (2011).
"Trompie" is the only feature film ever made from the highly popular series of Afrikaans books by Topsy Smith. Originally released in 1974 (a year before the first television broadcast in South Africa) in the Drive-In and school networks across South Africa). The film was written and produced by Tonie van der Merwe.
Afrikaans is the first language of most Afrikaner and Coloured people in South Africa and is spoken by 15% of the population. It is South Africa's third mother tongue.The other two in the top three are 1. English and 2. Zulu. Aproximately 95% of the the words in the Afrikaans vocabulary come from the Dutch language. Modern Dutch and Afrikaans share over 90% of their vocabulary. The language has not only influence from Holland but also English, German, Low Saxon, Scottish and Yiddish. Afrikaans was was called "Kaap-Hollands" which means "Cape Holland" before it changed in 1925 when Afrikaans first became an official language of South Africa.
At the time of filming Trompie, André Laubscher had previously played the role of the Karoo boy in "Groetnis vir die Eerste Minister." He was in standard 8, aged 15 at school in Randburg, an area located north west of Johannesburg. Tonie van der Merwe gave him the title role because he looked three years younger than he actually was.
The correct spelling of these two actors in Trompie is André Laubscher and Niël Perholdt, which you can see when the names start rolling as the movie begins.The e in André Laubscher's name should have a pronunciation mark above it as well as the e in Niël Perholdt's name. Both boys are Afrikaners and the spelling of their names is different and the pronunciation of the e in their Christian names is different to the English pronunciation of the letter e.