Willem Boshoff and the Authority He Critiques: A Reassessment
Sometime in the late 1970s, Willem Boshoff began compiling a dictionary that no publisher had commissioned, no authority had sanctioned, and almost no reader would be able to navigate without years of dedicated effort. The BWB Dictionary, named for his own initials, grew over decades into one of the most eccentric and genuinely original projects in South African art: an idiosyncratic archive of rare, obsolete, and invented words that functions simultaneously as artwork, autobiography, and quiet act of cultural defiance. That defiance carries a question embedded in its structure that critical writing on Boshoff has circled for forty years without quite landing on. Who builds their own dictionary and names it after themselves? Lexicographers build dictionaries. Authorities build dictionaries. The same impulse that drives official language control, the desire to define and thereby own meaning, operates inside Boshoff's most celebrated project. He critiques the politics of definition...
