How One Woman Saved South Africa’s Oldest Language

By Padraic Flanagan

Growing up on a white-owned farm on the fringes of the Kalahari Desert in apartheid-era South Africa, Katrina Esau was forbidden by her employer to speak the language she had learnt from her mother. For half a century, the click-rich language N|uu, once spoken by the hunter-gatherers of the Northern Cape, today known as San or “bushmen”, was almost forgotten.

The muting of Esau’s community spread widely across the Afrikaans-speaking Northern Cape province, following centuries of extermination and assimilation of the San. For several decades it was thought that N|uu, like many of southern Africa’s original click languages, was extinct.

But in the late 90s, after the country had transitioned to majority rule, Elsie Vaalbooi, a N|uu speaker, appealed on local radio for other speakers to come forward. It emerged that there were around 20 ageing speakers of the language in the Northern Cape region.

Within a few years, that number had dwindled drastically. Today, there is one known fl uent speaker of N|uu – Esau, who is in her late eighties.

After decades of being banned from speaking the language of her forebears, Esau has

dedicated the past two decades to teaching N|uu in an eff ort to preserve the San language

and culture. Despite years of silence, she never lost her fl uency. “I didn’t learn this language; I sucked it out of my mother’s breast,” she says in Lost Tongue, a fi lm about N|uu made in 2016. “But I buried it at the back of my head.”

In a schoolroom at the front of her home in Upington, Esau teaches local children the original language of her homeland. Africa is the only continent with languages in which clicks are regular consonants. The single pipe after the “N” represents a dental click consonant which is produced with the tip of the tongue against the upper teeth. N|uu, now classified as critically

endangered by Unesco, is one of just three languages known to feature a “kiss-click”

produced with both lips.

To teach this extraordinarily rich language, Esau – who was never taught to read or write – uses song, play and images. It helps her pupils, aged from three to 19, learn basics such as greetings, body parts, animal names and short sentences.

They are the only students of N|uu in the world, learning a language with 114 distinct sounds, including 45 clicks, 30 non-click consonants and 39 vowels. To place this in context, English, Russian and Chinese have about 50 sounds.

In recent years, Esau’s mission has been assisted by academics Sheena Shah and Matthias Brenzinger. Together with community members,

the three established a N|uu orthography – a set of conventions for writing a language – and created educational resources for Esau’s school.

The crowning achievement is an illustrated, 160-page trilingual N|uu-Afrikaans-English

reader, which has transformed the oral language into a written one. The reader serves as a device through which Esau’s granddaughter, Claudia Snyman, can teach pupils the written language.

“What Ouma Katrina desperately wanted were teaching and learning materials,” says Dr Shah. “She said children in her community went

▲(Left to right) Katrina, Matthias, Sheena, Claudia and David with the N/uu reader (Photo: Matthias Brenzinger) ◄ Katrina Esau teaching N/uu to her pupils (Photo: Matthias Brenzinger)

to school in the morning and had textbooks for maths, English and Afrikaans. But at her afterschool classes, they had no printed material. She wanted her language to be treated on the same level.”

The reader’s title, Ouma Geelmeid ke kx’u ||xa||xa N|uu (Ouma Geelmeid teaches N|uu),

takes up a story from Esau’s past. As a child, the Afrikaans owner of the farm where she worked called her “Geelmeid” – “meid” means “maidservant” and “geel” means “yellow” – in an off ensive reference to her skin colour. Today, she is known as Ouma (Grandma) Katrina.

“For Ouma Katrina, N|uu is a central part of her life,” says Dr Shah, who divides her time between universities in Hamburg, London and Bloemfontein in South Africa. “As linguists, we are interested in how people use language in everyday communication. With Ouma Katrina, you could sit there listening for hours to the stories she tells and the songs she sings.”

Given her advanced age, work is going on to ensure the language will continue to be heard in the future. Dr. Brenzinger, of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, said audio and video

recordings have been made of Esau so that the spoken language can be preserved.

Another hopeful sign is the recent publication

by Esau and her granddaughter of a children’s storybook in N|uu, Afrikaans and English,

called !Qhoi n|a Tjhoi (Tortoise and Ostrich). The folk tale, recounted by Esau, is aimed at inspiring youngsters through the wily antics of a tortoise.

Elinor Sisulu, executive director of Puku, the

children’s literature foundation behind the illustrated storybook

project, believes passionately that Esau’s work should be recognised fi nancially. “Ouma Katrina is the world expert in the N|uu language and the culture of her people,” she says. “No one knows more than she does. As such, she should be given the status of professor of the N|uu language and paid a professor’s salary.”

For Esau, who was awarded one of South Africa’s highest honours, the Order of the Baobab in silver, in recognition of her eff orts to preserve the San language and culture, the vital work continues. After receiving her award from the then-president Jacob Zuma, she explained: “Other people have their own languages. Why must my language be allowed to die? It must go on. As long as there are people, the language must go on.” https://inews.co.uk/news/world/how-onewoman-saved-south-africa-oldest-languagesan-bushmen-1044641Image credits: thesoleadventurer.com