On 29 July, late at night, I got an SMS from a colleague of mine: “Just heard from ATKV — WE’VE WON!!” The book was the Oxford Afrikaans-Engels English-Afrikaans Skoolwoordeboek School Dictionary and the prize was the Afrikaans Taal- en Kultuurvereniging’s Woordwysveertjie.

Many people will know about the Veertjies awarded to Deon Meyer (Onsigbaar) and Chris Karsten (Frats), amongst others — the awards are, after all, probably the most prestigious for Afrikaans fiction.

Not many will know about the dictionary prize though — apart from those also working on dictionaries or other reference works, or academically involved.

Our dictionary was published in January 2007, three years after I first proposed it to the Oxford board. Its development caused all kinds of heartache and late nights for the team, led by Dr Phillip Louw, but the end result is something that we are genuinely proud of, and proud to have had acknowledged by the ATKV.

And why the Tweet? The dictionary’s formal title is such a mouthful that it’s affectionately known as the Tweet (an English bowdlerisation of Tweetalige)…

There’s more on the ATKV awards on Litnet, on the local Oxford University Press website and in the Afrikaans print media.

It would be great if Grace Maguri, or anyone who has current contact details for her, could please contact Oxford University Press Southern Africa. OUP SA contact details are at:
http://www.oxford.co.za/business/contactus/.
Please direct your response to the Publishing Manager for Dictionaries and School Literature in English.

Thanks for your help!

First in print was Die Burger (7 August 2008), although of course all these were superseded by our favourite and most up-to-date spot Book SA!

Finuala will be reading from her new collection, Notes from the Dementia Ward, and I’ll read from Fourth Child, with a few new poems thrown in. I’m not sure if Joan will read from Requiem but I’m looking forward to it, and hope to see some of you there.

The ‘you can’t understand until you’ve lived there’ argument had kept me from visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me understanding about apartheid, I preferred to stay away. But now it had to be a very different place, 18 years after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, 14 years on from the day when South Africa had its first democratic election. I was going to be there anyway – Cape Town was the end point of another journey – and I thought I’d spend a couple of weeks and look around; be a regular tourist in a place where minds had been changed.

(There’s more at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/disk01_.html)

Reading this Diary piece made me consider unsubscribing to the LRB for the only time I can remember. I’m not sure why. I don’t think of myself as strikingly nationalist (the 1995 Rugby World Cup made barely a blip on my horizon, if that’s a useful dipstick), and yet the whole article, especially its tone of going bravely against the flow of opinion about South Africa, irked me.

I don’t doubt that people did say the kinds of drongo things that she reports them as saying. But surely that’s hardly a surprise. Trundle off to the UK or the States (just two obvious examples), or even Australia, and you’ll encounter some real dyed-in-the-wool types who speak in derogatory and offensive ways about their countrypeople, or particular segments of them anyway.

So we’re hardly unique.

Not that that makes it ok, or even less irksome or shaming (because there is something vaguely shaming about her comments). Perhaps its the shaming aspect that made me consider no more LRB. Like the Jewish jokes that can only be told by Jewish people, perhaps it’s only those who live here who can voice displeasure and disappointment without raising my defensive hackles.

I comfort myself a little with the thought that most of the people Jenny Diski mentions meeting seem to be middle-aged and over. Don’t younger people, on average, have views that are less hair-raising?

I hope so.

And finally, maybe South Africa just didn’t boil her vegetables — not every place can, after all.