When FH Odendaal High School’s famous ‘two boeties’ walked onto the stage on Monday evening (October 12), the scene could easily have been mistaken for a hard-fought rugby match, complete with cheers, shouts and enthusiastic calls of ‘Go, boeties!’.

But the crowd was celebrating a different kind of victory. Identical twins Jade and Jayden Edwards might have made history at the Pretoria school, founded in 1955, by becoming the first pair of twins to be elected to its school council.

Talk about double trouble!

Erik Combrink, the boys’ subject head and Jade’s rugby coach, says as far as he knows it is indeed a first for the school. He cannot recall another pair of identical twins at FH Odendaal – and he has been there for a few decades – let alone twins serving together on the school council.

While Jade follows in the footsteps of one of the school’s famous former pupils, Springbok rugby legend Joost van der Westhuizen, by playing for the first rugby team, Jayden prefers soccer.

On the sports field, at least, you can tell them apart. Everywhere else, it gets a little trickier.

Their mother, Virginia Keppler-Young, a DA Tshwane Ward 87 councillor candidate, laughed as she recalled how hard it was to tell her sons apart when they were younger.

That is where their nickname, ‘boeties’, comes from. People often addressed them simply as ‘boeties’, but as they grew older, the twins grew less fond of being called ‘die boeties’ and reminded their mother they had names of their own.

Even today, Keppler-Young sometimes struggles to tell them apart.

“I think,” she sighed, “Jayden – or is it Jade? – has a fuller face, while Jade’s – or is it Jayden’s? – face is a bit more oval. They both have birthmarks, but Jade also has a patch on his head where his hair does not grow.”

Combrink also battles to know which twin is which.

“I have known the boys since Grade 8, but I still struggle to tell them apart. When I address them, I ask which one is the ‘sissie’ – that is usually the soccer-playing ‘boetie’ – and which one is the ‘boetie’,” he says, referring to the long-standing sporting joke that soccer players spend 90 minutes pretending to be injured, while rugby players spend 80 minutes pretending they aren’t.

Keppler-Young does not believe her sons are ‘double trouble’. She prefers to think of them as ‘double goodness’.

“I have four children, and my two eldest, both girls, received more scoldings than the ‘two boeties’. They are both well-mannered, respectful and strong leaders, each in their own way.”

As a devoted Christian, Keppler-Young says she has taught her sons to distinguish between right and wrong. “They will always do the right thing, even if it means they are going to get into trouble for it.”

She says Jade is a little more serious, while Jayden is more outgoing.

Keppler-Young believes the twins have learnt to draw on each other’s strengths. “In the lower grades, they would receive the same marks for their assignments and schoolwork, much to their teachers’ frustration, because they have different skills.

“Eventually, the teachers realised that if, for example, one struggled to get the colouring of a picture just right, he would send it to his brother to finish. They would help each other out like that.”

That is why the family decided not to place them in the same register class.

The boys have not yet decided what they want to study, but Keppler-Young believes they may choose something related to sports science.

“I believe that whatever they choose to do in later life, their lives will turn out wonderfully.”

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