A queen lives on the outskirts of Upington, in South Africa’s Northern Cape. The queen is old and when she dies, maybe not only she is gone, but an entire empire.
Katrina Esau is 88. Her congregation crowned her Queen of the Western Nǁnǂe (ǂKhomani) San in 2015. A year earlier, the then President Jacob Zuma presented her with the National Baobab Order in silver.
For the past eight decades, Esau had gone largely unnoticed. Their people, the San – of whom the western Nǁnǂe (ǂKhomani) are a group of many – are good at this. Their survival depended on it: initially for the countless centuries in which they had South Africa to themselves and skillfully lived in the countryside as hunters and gatherers. And then, with the arrival of other groups to escape the control of those who harmed them.
Esau was born on the farm where her parents worked. The African owner of the farm disgustingly renamed the young queen “Geelmeid”. “Meid” means “maid”, while “geel” (yellow) is a blatant reference to skin tone. Some of them still know her – lovingly – as Ouma (Grandma) Geelmeid. But often it is Queen Katrina.
The farm owner also forbade Esau to speak her native language, N | uu; a language with roots in the origins of mankind. Instead, the newly coined Afrikaans language (only about 300 years old) would be Esau’s cover for most of her life.
N | uu is one of our last linguistic connections to the earliest humans: the hunters and gatherers in southern and eastern Africa
Cut off on the remote farm, Esau began to speak Afrikaans, “burying” the language that had “sucked out” her [her] Mother’s Breast “. This funeral was just one of many: the language, a descendant of the language of the first humans, had already suffered its fatal blow about a decade earlier.
1931 saw the opening of the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (now incorporated into the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park). The terrain here is semi-desert with two dry river beds, the Nossob and the Auob, flowing once in a blue moon. But for the ǂKhomani, the last ethnic community to speak Esau’s language, the landscape was home. When the park opened, the ǂKhomani families were displaced and dispersed, with the one remaining circuit board of the language being destroyed. ǂKhomani children would henceforth be born into a world of Afrikaans.
Besides! Xun (spoken in Namibia), ǂAmkoe and Taa (both spoken in Botswana), N | uu is one of our last linguistic connections to the earliest people: the hunters and gatherers in southern and eastern Africa. All four languages are critically endangered: ǂAmkoe has about 1,000 speakers; Taa 3,000 speakers; and! Xun 14,000 to 18,000.
N | uu now only has two: Esau and her brother Simon Sauls.
We don’t know when the N | uu language evolved – it’s too old to age precisely – but its roots certainly couldn’t be deeper. However, when it becomes one of the 600 to 800 languages that are likely to disappear in the near future, we shouldn’t just mourn its antiquity. The wealth and beauty of N | uu are also astonishing: English, for example, has 44 different speech sounds (phonemes), while N | uu has 114.
Then there are his clicks. The bar in “N | uu” represents a click consonant – more precisely, a tooth click that is articulated with the tip of the tongue, which quickly sucks away from the upper teeth. A century ago, at least 100 indigenous click languages were likely spoken in the southern and eastern regions of Africa. For those unfamiliar with clicks, it may seem like a click speaker’s mouth has turned into a percussion instrument. Note that N | uu makes a meaningful difference between an incredible 45 clicks; Hearing fluent language is a linguistic fireworks display.
The star of the N | uu-Klick repertoire is the phenomenally rare bilabial “kiss-click”, which sounds eerily like kissing and can be heard in only two of the approximately 7,000 other languages in the world. (One of them is Taa, which has 111 click phonemes.)
As Esau’s years have progressed, their urgency to sow new seeds of N | uu has increased. She started her in the early 2000s teach the language to her parish from a classroom built in her front yard in Rosedale, a township near Upington, with singing, dancing and games. Her students, ages three to 19, are the only N | uu students in the world.
Over the past few years, others have supported Esau’s efforts. A team of linguists helped create spelling and teaching materials for N | uu so that her granddaughter Claudia Snyman can teach the written language (Esau cannot read). Tortoise and Ostrich, a children’s book in N | uu, Afrikaans and English was released in May.
But the beauty of N | uu should not be used to paint an overly romantic picture of Esau’s people – the San. Michael Daiber is the managing director of Khwa ttu Heritage Center Heritage, an hour’s drive north of Cape Town, called the “Embassy” of the San. He says the center, which also offers accommodation, is an antidote to the San image of “sunsets and silhouettes and smiling people”.
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“Establishments have promoted the image of the naked Bushmen hunter-gatherer,” said Daiber. “All of this’ the last surviving ‘,’ unique encounter ‘,’ come see it while it’s still there ‘language. The leaders who founded! Khwa ttu in 1996 said,’ This is not our history. Our country became taken from us. We have a really tough history. ‘”
“Where San live, it looks like uninhabited land,” added Joram / Uiseb, a San from the Namibian Hai || om group who is the cultural heritage coordinator at! Khwa ttu. “Land is life. Only take from nature what you really need.” For the San, land was stewardship, not ownership, and South Africa was easily wrested from them.
“In the 1980s I was told there were no more Bushmen,” Daiber said. “And here, 40 years later, I made a career that only worked with San people. How do you measure that and who makes decisions?”
The “it” to which he is referring is the identity of the San. Even “San” itself is an exonym for the indigenous people of South Africa. It was introduced by the Khoikhoi, a people who came from what is now Botswana. The term “Bushman”, on the other hand, is a translation of “Boesman”, as the Dutch, who settled the region from the middle of the 17th century, called the hunters and gatherers. But while the San language and lifestyle have been largely obliterated, people live on.
“It’s amazing how they survived,” said Daiber.
Between 120,000 and 140,000 San live in southern Africa today: around 60,000 in Botswana, 40,000 in Namibia and the rest in South Africa, a small number in Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe. ! Khwa ttu represents the San as they are now: survivors with no land of their own to practice their traditions on. Sheena Shah, who together with her linguist Matthias Brenzinger established a N | uu orthography with Esau, believes that the center has a special energy for both the San and the visitors because of its role as a place of learning.
“San learn computer skills and financial management here. But they are also trained to use traditional knowledge like ethnobotany for ecotourism. Then they practice their skills with visitors,” said Shah. “We did our tour of that fynbos, with a San guide showing us the plants he uses in traditional medicine or as food. “
“Visitors to! Khwa ttu meet San at all levels: tour guides, waitresses, shopkeepers,” added Daiber. “It’s nice to hear the stories from the San themselves.”
And to hear it is a privilege.
“San people are very shy,” said / Uiseb. “You don’t mean to say ‘I’m a San’. Few people say ‘I’m a San’. “
To take a look at their disenfranchisement, consider that South Africa has 11 official languages and none of them have anything to do with the country’s first people. In addition, it is rare for the San to have land rights or access to natural resources. Where they are allowed land use, it is usually shared with ranchers who graze it.
Elinor Sisulu, managing director of Fit, the foundation for children’s literature behind the N | uu children’s book project, is very aware of the politics surrounding the San identity. “The Western publishing paradigm was very exploitative of indigenous languages,” she said. “Katrina Esau is the expert, so we made it very clear that she has to be paid. We all use her knowledge. She should be recognized as a professor, but the academic paradigm does not recognize original knowledge.”
It’s nice to hear the stories from the San themselves
“We are powerless now,” said / Uiseb. “Two thousand years ago the San were so powerful, but now we are spectators watching the people destroy the land Table Mountain could speak … It has seen a lot: From the top of Africa we have populated the whole world. It is very important that we are recognized in one way or another. “
But there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. On April 1, the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act comes into effect, opening the door for representatives of the San and Khoikhoi to have their say in South Africa’s national and provincial houses of traditional leaders. “It gives us the power to negotiate from within,” said / Uiseb. “If you let the process go, you are now a legislator yourself.” The law may ultimately facilitate future San land claims.
One person who is absolutely not afraid to say “I am a San” is Esau, the queen of a South Africa that they dearly hopes will not die with her.
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