Last fluent speaker on a quest to keep ancient San language alive

IN HER humble home on the red soil of the Green Kalahari, 92-year-old Katrina Esau listened intently as her two great-grandchildren practised the ancient Njuu language of South Africa’s indigenous San people.

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OUMA Katrina Esau, better known as 'ouma', or grandmother, Esau is determined to keep Nluu alive.

(File)

As the young children enthusiastically sang out phrases, Esau interjected occasionally to correct their pronunciation of the distinct sounds and deep clicks of her mother tongue, of which she is the last first-language speaker.

Visitors to the family home near the banks of the Orange River in the Northern Cape province also chipped in, with pride, a few words of Njuu in homage to the matriarch’s efforts to keep alive a language that researchers say is 25 000 years old and endangered.

On the walls, photographs of the quietly dignified and graceful Esau wearing a crown and collar of animal hide, feathers and quills denoted her status as a queen in the Njuu house of the San people, among South Africa’s oldest cultures.

Better known as “ouma”, or grandmother, Esau is determined to keep N|uu alive.

She was born in 1933 on a farm near Olifantshoek in the southern Kalahari Desert, about 150 kilometres (93 miles) from the border with Botswana.

Her parents worked for a white family that spoke Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch settlers.