PLAASLIKE ADVIESRAAD | LOCAL ADVISORY BOARD

Plaaslike Adviesraad | Local Advisory Board

Erin Pretorius

University of the Western Cape

Erin is a (morpho-) syntactician by training, and is based at the University of the Western Cape since 2017. She obtained a PhD in Theoretical Syntax in 2017 as a joint degree from Utrecht University (Netherlands) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Since 2019 she has been the principal investigator of The Syntactic Ecology of Kaaps (SEcoKa), which is a project about understanding the morphological and syntactic properties of the Kaapses spoken on and around the Cape Peninsula.

Erin’s primary research interests include (morpho-) syntactic micro-variation in Afrikaans varieties, the syntax-lexicon interface, categorial gradience and hybridity, modelling categorisation in Generative Grammar, and the formal analysis of spatial expressions. Erin’s past work has focused mainly on the cartography and spellout of the adpositional domain in Afrikaans.

Dion Nkomo

Rhodes University

Dion Nkomo is an Associate Professor of African Language Studies at the School of Languages and Literatures at Rhodes University. He is presently serving as the NRF SARChI Chair for Intellectualisation of African Languages, Multilingualism and Education (on an interim basis).

He obtained a B.A. Honours (with distinction) in African Languages from the University of Zimbabwe (2003), an MPhil. (Cum Laude) Lexicography (2008) and a PhD in Lexicography (2012) from Stellenbosch University, as well as a Post-Graduate Diploma in Higher Education from Rhodes University (2014).

Prof Nkomo previously worked as a lexicographer under the African Languages Lexical (ALLEX) Project (University of Zimbabwe) where he produced a Ndebele Dictionary of Music Terms, Isichazamazwi SezoMculo in 2006), and a language practitioner under the University of Cape Town’s Multilingualism Education Project (2009 – 2011). Apart from lexicography, his other areas of academic interests include language planning and policy, multilingualism, language teaching, translation, terminology and, lately, higher education studies. He has published and supervised post-graduate students working on various aspects of applied language studies. His work appears as articles in Lexikos, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, International Journal of Lexicography and Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America and edited books. He is an African Humanities Programme fellow under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, a recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award for 2016 at Rhodes University, a C2 National Research Foundation (NRF) rated researcher and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf).

He is a member of editorial boards for several academic journals, and a member of national bodies and research networks working on African languages. He is the Secretary of AFRILEX, the African Association for Lexicography (since 2017), the Vice Chairperson of Globalex, the global alliance of continental associations of lexicography and the Acting Chairperson of the Board of the isiXhosa National Lexicography Unit.

Shirmoney Rhode

Author, Poet

Shirmoney Rhode is a writer and performance poet who grew up on the Cape Flats in Elsies River. She completed her BA, BA-Hon (Afrikaans) and PGCE at the University Of the Western Cape. She predominantly writes in Kaapse Afrikaans, which is the dialect of Afrikaans spoken in the Western Cape.

She started writing at the age of 13. She is passionate about telling the stories of people in her community and performs her work on different platforms in Cape Town. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Nomme 20 Delphi Straat and she has performed her work on different platforms in South Africa. She currently teaches Afrikaans at Claremont High School in Cape Town.

Hein Willemse

University of Pretoria

Hein Willemse was born in Ladismith in the Little Karoo. On account of his father’s work as a postman the family moved to Mossel Bay and later to Worcester where he completed his schooling in 1975 at Esselen Park High School. He completed several junior and postgraduate degrees at the University of the Western Cape and the University of South Africa.

He taught at the University of Western Cape and is a former head of the Department of Afrikaans at the University of Pretoria. He has served as a visiting professor at several local and foreign universities, including universities in Central and North America, the rest of Africa and Europe. He is also a former President of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA).

Since his student days he worked as a stringer, reporter or columnist in various student, community and alternative publications. For a period, he was the executive director of OLM Publications, a literacy publisher. He served as the editor-in-chief of Tydskrif vir letterkunde, a leading academic journal from 2002 to 2019. He is presently a columnist for the Afrikaans newspapers, Die Burger and Beeld.

His research interest focuses mainly on South African literature and the Afrikaans oral traditions. His publications include Aan die ander kant: Swart Afrikaanse Skrywers in die Afrikaanse letterkunde (2007), and edited or co-edited books such as More than Brothers: James Matthews and Peter Clarke at 70 (2000), Achmat Davids’s The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims (2011), Hostel (2018), and Onverdrote vlyt — ’n geskiedenis van die Departement Afrikaans aan die Universiteit van Pretoria (2020).

He was acknowledged for his work with the Heritage Award (2000) by the Western Cape Ministry of Culture and the Afrikaans Onbeperk award by the board of the Klein-Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (2002). In 2020 he received the award for the Best long essay review for 2019 and his documentary film Die versteekte geskiedenisse van Afrikaans — The hidden histories of Afrikaans (2018) was nominated for the 2020 Humanities and Social Sciences Award of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Nathan Trantraal

Author, Rhodes

Nathan Trantraal was born in Cape Town in 1983, the third of six children. He is married to Ronelda Kamfer, they have a daughter called Seymour and a cat named Sugar. They live a very quiet life in the Eastern Cape. He is a poet, cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, translator, columnist, reviewer, editor and graphic designer.

He holds a master’s degree in creative writing at Rhodes University. At Rhodes University’s School of Languages, he developed and teaches the course’s Kaaps and graphic novel components. He has won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry, the Jan Rabie/Marjorie Wallace Bursary for his comics and The Pendoring Gold Prize for graphic design. He has made cartoons for The Cape Times, The Cape Argus and writes a bi-weekly column for Rapport, for which he was awarded a SALA. His work has been exhibited in Cape Town, Munich and Amsterdam.

His poetry collections include, Chokers en Survivors, Alles het niet kom wôd and Oolog (all published with Kwela Uitgwers) Chokers en Survivors was translated into French as Vache enragée (ÉDITIONS LANSKINE). He has written one collection of columns, Wit issie ŉ colour nie (Kwela). As a cartoonist some of his work includes, Stormkaap (Tafelberg), Coloureds (Jincom publishers) and Crossroads (PM Press).

Andre Trantraal

Author, children story books

Andre Trantraal, 41, is an illustrator, writer and translator. He grew up in the townships of Mitchell’s Plain and Bishop Lavis and is therefore intimately acquainted with the social conditions as well as the less newsworthy but equally as relevant ordinary human face of people who call these places home.

Much of his work is written in Kaaps and he is a pioneer in recording, through cartoons, children’s books, comic book stories and translations, this particular language. His first published work was a continuity cartoon strip, which he wrote and partly illustrated, that appeared in the Cape Argus in 2003. His comic art has been exhibited in Hamburg and Amsterdam as well as in Cape Town. He wrote and partly illustrated a graphic novel, Drome Kom Altyd Andersom Uit, which appeared in 2008, as well as a comic book, Coloureds, that appeared in 2010. He adapted historian Koni Benson’s doctoral thesis on the history of women’s political struggles into a serialized graphic history titled Crossroads, which was first published between 2010 and 2016. He contributed artwork for an illustrated adaptation of a report by a commission, headed by Kate ‘O Regan and Vusi Pikoli, which was tasked with investigating police incompetence and brutality in Khayelitsha. A weekly cartoon strip that he wrote, The Richenbaums, appeared in the Cape Times between 2010 and 2015. A second cartoon strip, titled Ruthie, about a black family living in apartheid-era South Africa, which he partly illustrated, ran for a year in Rapport. Trantraal is the author and illustrator of the Afrikaans children’s book series, Keegan and Samier. He also translated the middle grade novel Ghost, by American author Jason Reynolds, into Kaaps. He has made artistic contributions to the Rock Girl project, an initiative concerned with the empowerment of girls of primary school age in disadvantaged communities. He also provided dialogue consultancy services to the film City of Violence, starring Forest Whitaker, which was filmed in Cape Town.

Ronelda Kamfer

Author

Ronelda Sonnet Kamfer was born in Cape Town. She spent part of her childhood on a farm in Grabouw, where her grandparents were farm workers. Her debut volume, Noudat Slapende Honde (2008), won the Eugène Marais Prize. Her second book, grond/Santekraam, won the Absa Kanna Award in (2012). She was a writer in residence in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and in La Rochelle, France.

Her third collection, Hammie, was published in 2016 and fourth in Chinatown (2019). Her work has been translated into Dutch by Alfred Schaffer, Nu de Slapende Honde (2009), Santenkraam (2012), Mammie (2017) and Chinatown (2021) by Podium Uitgeverij Amsterdam, Italian, Terra / E tutto il resto (2018) by Raffaelli Editore en Frans (2021), Caracters Editore in Paris. She completed her MA degree at Rhodes University in 2018. Her debut novel, Kompoun, will be published October 2021 by Kwela Publishers. She is currently working on a fifth volume of poetry and a collection of short stories.

Earl Basson

Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Earl Basson is a lecturer in the Intermediate Phase at the Faculty of Education of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, where he teaches Afrikaans and Methodology of Afrikaans teaching. Previously, he worked as a publishing assistant at NB Publishers, a multi-grade teacher at Groote Schuur Hospital School, head tutor and co-curriculum designer at the Humanities Extended Degree Program of Stellenbosch University and a homeroom teacher at Capricorn Primary School.

He was also a part of the UCDG Multilingual MobiLex Project, where he was responsible for the translation and editing of Afrikaans-English subject terminology lists.

In 2013 he obtained a BA Language and Culture with Afrikaans and Dutch and General Linguistics as majors. He continued his studies and in 2015 he received the HonsBA Afrikaans and Dutch and Postgraduate Certificate in Education. In 2017, he attended the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s summer school and completed the Doing Research with Discourse Analysis course with distinction. He received his master’s degree with distinction in 2018 and was also named the top M.Ed student. He is currently working on his doctoral degree in Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. His study focuses on the restandardisation of Afrikaans and Kaapse Afrikaans in the classroom.

He has presented his research at various national conferences and an international research workshop. He is also involved in numerous projects, i.a., the Words Open Worlds’ debate competition, the Afrikaanse Taalraad’s Curriculum Initiative, the inter-institutional research project Ontlaering/Unlaagering, the UJ literary awards and the Afrikaans language and culture podcast, Sitkamer. He has published academic research and book reviews and most recently acted as the guest editor of the latest edition of the Stilet journal. In 2020, he was the recipient of Ghent University’s Africa-Ghent research fellowship. He will be joining the Ghent Centre for Afrikaans for two months where he will do research on status and corpus planning and its implications for Kaapse Afrikaans in the classroom.

He is passionate about linguistics, literature and language in education. He describes himself as a relentless language activist and views the classroom as a restoration space for linguistic injustices.

Olivia Coetzee

Author

Olivia was born in Mariental, a small town in the southern parts of Namibia, and grew up in Electric City, Eerste Rivier. She completed her high school in 1999 and began her tertiary education 11 years later. Olivia’s professional experience ranges from retail work to volunteering and activism.

Olivia is an alumnus of the University of the Western Cape, where she completed her undergraduate degree and honour’s degree, as well as an alumnus of the University of Cape Town where she pocketed her master’s degree in Creative Writing in July 2017. She plans to continue her academic career, working on PhD research around the history of Kaaps, and hopes to add to the growing volume of Kaaps literature.

Olivia was part of a local poetry workshop, in search for her voice. During this writing period, she started understanding the importance of her writing within the greater spheres of Southern African literature. She, however, only later in her writing career understood the importance of writing in her mother tongue, and the impact this had on the material she produced and the people who read her work. But it was in the space of higher learning education where she discovered the power of her creative writing voice.

Olivia’s creative writing work has been published on different platforms. Although she is a late buddying artist, her skill with words and her unique voice, brought her the opportunity to write for an independent online journal, Litnet. She is a freelancing writer and translator on this platform and her work is currently only published in Kaaps. The content she published on Litnet ranges from poetry, opinion-pieces, and the translation.

Olivia made her writing debut with her novel “Innie Shadows” that was published in December of 2019. She is currently translating “Innie Shadows” from Kaaps into English. She aspires to continue her success in writing, by writing in her mother tongue. Through her current work, she hopes to inspire and challenge others to not be scared, but to own their identity. Her work is available for reading and sharing on litnet.co.za.

Diana Ferrus

Author, Poet

Diana Ferrus works as an administrator at the University of Western Cape. She is interested in recording the stories of black Afrikaans women, and wants to publish an anthology of short stories. This is after she did extensive research about black Afrikaans women writers.

Diana is wellknown for her poem about the Khoisan woman Sarah Baartman whose remains were on display in Paris until 1986. In 2002 Diana read her poem for Sarah Baartman at the handing over of the remains to the South African government. “Iv’e come to take you home, home! Remember the veld, the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees, the air is cool there”. This poem will be the title poem of her English poetry collection due for publication in August 2010.

Kontak Os

021 959 9398

dwkaaps@uwc.ac.za

Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR)
University of the Western Cape
Robert Sobukwe Road
Private Bagx17
Bellville
7535
SOUTH AFRICA