NONPLUSSED offers collections in various forms: lists of Arabic names and their meanings; entries from a dictionary; bibles in 90 different languages; lists of ‘big problems’; representations of all the graves in one cemetery; lists of names of deceased children, without counting the thousands of stones, breads, papers, puzzle-pieces, grains of sand ... Boshoff also uses a bible collection in another work, BAD FAITH CHRONICLES (1996). The work consists of the bible in all possible South African languages. These ‘collections’ of languages have a dual concern: to prolong the life of a disappearing language and to come to terms with the aftermath of Babel. Boshoff struggles to reconcile these two notions in a text written as a project proposition for the work LEBAB

“Obsessed with the idea of difference and the other I visited New York a few years ago. I wanted to see how cultural and linguistic dissimilarity was able to contribute to an awareness of one’s common humanity within the ‘place’ afforded to the well-being of so-called ‘aliens’. To do this I looked for texts in Native American languages. The American Bible Society has only five native American languages in print: Western Apache, Muskokee, Navajo, Hawaiian and Iñupiaq. I was led to believe that there once were about 400 dialects and languages in northern America. Curiously the Bible Society also offered a Bible in Gullah, a predominantly English ‘pidgin’ still teeming with a western African turn of phrase. The lady who runs the Bible Society library told me that she stored many old snippets of Bible translations in lost Native American languages, written by missionaries over the centuries. As with African languages, writing in the Roman alphabet was once a foreign device. The frightening thing about these snippets of writing was that they were the only evidence of the languages contained in them – their futile Rosetta stone. If it hadn’t been for the missionaries trying to introduce the written Bible in local tongues, there would have been no proof of the existence of these languages at all. I fear we have a similar situation with some of the smaller languages of Africa now, and that we shall have it with the dwindling larger ones in the near future. With the death of these we might be left with only snippets of indecipherable text to muse over – attempting to clone the Dodo from splinters of egg.”

The disaster at Babel has ambiguous consequences. People lost the ability to understand each other without needing the filter of translation. But it gained a multitude of means of expression. We now seem to have reached another threshold in this movement – minority languages are dying, smothered by big and mighty ‘world languages’. Boshoff, in LEBAB, sees another disaster, this time two towers tumble. The power relationships around choice of language are manifold and in Boshoff’s work they are translated into physical presence. In ABAMFUSA LAWULA (the purple shall govern) (1997) he collects slogans used during the struggle against Apartheid. The slogans in their original languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, etc), are written in large lettering, readable from a distance. Translations into English are offered in microscopic writing ‘between the lines’. People who can read Zulu, will decipher the meaning without having to come closer, the dominant English speaker must make an additional effort. The same principle is used in several language-based works. SECRET LETTERS (2003), for example, considers the condition of a prisoner and his isolation from information.

SDROW FO NWODKAERB features the DICTIONARY OF PERPLEXING ENGLISH begun by Boshoff in the latter part of the 1980’s and completed in 1999.
“The dictionary contains 18,000 entries of words that are defunct or too ‘difficult’ for even the most erudite English speakers. The aim was to give these ‘perplexing’ English words from the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.) a simple explanation – a face, so to speak. It was indeed necessary to read the entire O.E.D. to be as inclusive as possible. A number of artworks with selected themes were made from this larger DICTIONARY OF PERPLEXING ENGLISH, the idea being that translations in the eleven official languages of South Africa or even in Braille would then be placed in such contexts and places as to break the ice between the English intelligentsia and those of different (disenfranchised) linguistic persuasion.” Boshoff, notes for SDROW FO NWODKAERB).

The works in question are amongst Boshoff’s best known: BLIND ALPHABET PROJECT (1991–1995), a dictionary of ‘Morphology’ under administration of blind people; KRING VAN KENNIS (Circle of knowledge), eleven large granite boulders with a dictionary of ‘-ologies’ and ‘-isms’ in every official South African language; WRITING IN THE SAND (2000–2003), perplexing English words and their definitions, translated into one of the minority languages of South Africa, written in black and white sand.

The DICTIONARY OF PERPLEXING ENGLISH is not published and the text, as used for the collage of SDROW FO NWODKAERB, remains a rough version. Every entry has a definition of exactly four lines. The definitions, while derived from the Oxford English Dictionary are readable as a continuous text. Boshoff gives his own examples, often unexpected and, where possible, from a South-African point of view. For example: embadometry, A word, almost totally lost for a primitive method of determining the size of a land. The streets of Johannesburg are a little disjointed in places because its embadometors used leather thongs in the beginning.'

In NONPLUSSED Boshoff reacts to political actuality in the Middle East. The disaster of colonization happens yet again. Painfully he is reminded of another war over land in which his own family was involved, the Anglo-Boer War less than a century ago.

“He confronts the expropriation of land-, mineral- and other rights that secure the profits of the land. Those who claim these profits are comfortably removed from ensuing conflict, sharing a power base that already has everything, but must have more, and by implication, must have that which belongs to others. Sophisticated land-, oil- and gold grabbing is no longer called colonialism, but has become ‘vested interest’. The sun indeed never sets on the ‘progress’ of the despoiling empire. Profit-sharing actually means ‘you now work for US’. Job opportunities mean ‘cheap labour’ and controvertibles become convertibles. He sardonically states the obvious: “Without poor countries there are no rich countries. The desperation to take land at all cost is portrayed in his ‘hi-tech’ cemetery that obliquely comments on the massacre of 35,000 women and children by a 500,000 strong military force. HOW TO WIN A WAR ‘salutes’ the champion Mammon, over a 100 years after it misled its luckless troops to die and kill, non-the-wiser as to who their real commander is.” (from the press release for NONPLUSSED) In 2003, Boshoff began working on the problematic around British politics in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century: SPOILED VOTE (2003), TRYING TO VOTE (2003) and 32000 DARING LITTLE NUISANCES (2003). The BREAD AND PEBBLE ROAD MAP, like the ‘writing in’ series, gets involved in the ‘land grabbing’ wars of Iraq and Palestine. How can the expropriated people manifest the claim they have on land? Writing their names on the stones of this territory, the BREAD AND PEBBLE ROAD MAP traces the journey of one such lost wanderer through the desert.

Boshoff has indeed made many such ‘maps to get lost by’: MAP TO GET LOST BY (1979), from KYKAFRIKAANS; SHREDDED EVIDENCE (1979), a ‘bale of straw’ made of shredded paper with printed ‘one-liners’, naming and translating the discriminations of apartheid; MA SE MAT (1979); TRYING TO VOTE (2003), an ‘endlessly disturbed landscape’ of British and South African maps, with hopeless voter’s crosses; FAR FAR AWAY (2004), the story of Willem Hendrik Boshoff, being lost and the maps for his involuntary journeys.