She Never Went to School — Then a University Gave Her a Doctorate for Saving a Language

Katrina Esau never had the opportunity to go to school.

She grew up in South Africa at a time when the language she heard around her was being pushed toward silence and Indigenous communities faced generations of discrimination and cultural suppression.

She never learned to read or write through formal schooling.

Yet decades later, a university would place an academic hood over her shoulders and call her Doctor.

Not because she had spent years studying inside lecture halls.

But because she had spent much of her life protecting something that might otherwise have disappeared forever.

Her language.

Katrina Esau, affectionately known as Ouma Katrina, is regarded as the last remaining fluent speaker of N|uu, a critically endangered Indigenous language belonging to the Tuu language family of southern Africa.

When other fluent speakers died one after another, Katrina realized that an extraordinary responsibility had fallen to her.

If she remained silent, an ancient linguistic tradition could disappear with her.

So she chose to teach.

From a small classroom at her home in Rosedale, near Upington in South Africa's Northern Cape, she began passing N|uu words, sounds, songs and stories to children.

She worked with her granddaughter and linguists to develop educational materials.

She helped create a children's book.

She contributed crucial knowledge to a N|uu dictionary.

And in 2023, the University of Cape Town honored the woman who had never been able to attend school with an honorary Doctor of Literature.

Her story is not simply about one remarkable woman.

It is about what happens when a language reaches the edge of extinction — and one person refuses to let it disappear quietly.

A Language Carried Through Generations

N|uu is an Indigenous language associated with the ǂKhomani San community of southern Africa.

It belongs to the Tuu language family and is notable for an exceptionally complex sound system that includes numerous click consonants.

But a language is much more than a collection of unusual sounds.

Every language contains ways of describing the world.

Names for places.

Ways of identifying plants and animals.

Songs.

Stories.

Humor.

Family relationships.

Traditional knowledge.

Memories.

A language carries traces of the people who have spoken it across generations.

When a language disappears, therefore, humanity loses more than vocabulary.

An entire way of organizing and expressing experience can become inaccessible.

For much of the twentieth century, however, N|uu seemed to be heading toward exactly that fate.

By the late 1990s, researchers had believed the language might already be extinct.

Then something remarkable happened.

People in South Africa's Northern Cape came forward who could still speak it.

According to the University of Cape Town, around 20 elderly fluent speakers were identified during this period.

Among them were Katrina Esau and some of her siblings.

Suddenly, a language believed to have vanished was speaking again.

But its survival remained extremely fragile.

Twenty speakers is not a secure language community.

It is a warning.

And as the years passed, that group became smaller.

One speaker died.

Then another.

Eventually, Katrina was the last fluent speaker from that group still alive.

The language had survived.

But now an enormous part of its future rested with one elderly woman.

Why N|uu Nearly Disappeared

Languages do not usually vanish because people collectively decide that their mother tongue no longer matters.

They disappear because circumstances make it increasingly difficult — and sometimes dangerous or socially costly — to continue using them.

N|uu's decline cannot be separated from South Africa's history of colonialism, dispossession and apartheid.

UCT describes the language as having re-emerged after centuries of suppression. During colonial and apartheid periods, Indigenous San communities experienced severe disruption to their land, culture and social structures. Afrikaans increasingly became the dominant language in many communities where N|uu had once been spoken.

Katrina's granddaughter, Claudia Snyman, has described how older generations were discouraged from transmitting N|uu to their children.

Writing about her family's experience, Claudia explained that colonial and apartheid authorities pushed previous generations toward Afrikaans, contributing to the loss of their ancestral language.

This helps explain one of the paradoxes surrounding endangered languages.

A person can speak a language fluently while their children cannot.

That is what makes language extinction happen so quickly.

A language does not need to lose every speaker at once.

It only needs to stop moving from one generation to the next.

Once children stop learning a language naturally at home, the number of fluent speakers begins to decline.

If nothing changes, eventually the youngest fluent speakers become elderly.

Then there may be only a handful.

Then one.

N|uu reached that terrifying point.

And Ouma Katrina found herself standing there.

The Woman Who Never Entered a Classroom

Katrina's own childhood makes what happened next even more extraordinary.