Written by Lorato Trok
I will never forget the day I met Ouma Katrina five years ago in the summer of 2016. I never thought it was possible. I was a Project Manager at African Storybook and my manager at the time showed me an article about the old lady who was fighting to preserve her endangered language. I have heard about her, but I was not following her work as much. After I read the article, I was so intrigued by her work and immediately researched ways I could get hold of her and/or her people. Two months later I was in Upington sitting with Ouma Katrina and members of the Khoisan Heritage Council. I won Ouma Katrina and her family’s trust on my first and subsequent visits. I diligently followed her work and became an advocate of her work. The crescendo of my literary relationship with Ouma Katrina came when I joined Puku in October 2017. Elinor Sisulu, Puku’s Executive Director, as a lifelong advocate for the promotion of African languages in early literacy, worked diligently to get funding for the publication of the NIuu children’s book. The rest is history.
Monday May 24th 2021 will forever be etched in my memory. As someone who was born and raised in the Northern Cape, with a Namibian father whose home language was Oshivambo but assimilated as a Coloured person who spoke Afrikaans when he immigrated to South Africa, saying I was excited on this day will be an understatement. I was ecstatic. As I was watching people coming into the hall for the launch, I saw my community. Every greeting was in NIuu, with happy faces and wide smiles, I saw a community celebrating being seen after all these years. I have never seen Ouma Katrina that happy. When she got up the stage to speak, she cried tears of happiness and she said so. As an author, it does not matter how many times you have received complementary books from your publisher, it always seems like the first time. Imagine doing that for the first time at the age of 88! No less with a book that no one but you speaks the language the book was created in. Even though the book was trilingual, the focus was on the NIuu language and how the book was created. There was a feeling of hope in the community. Hope that eventually, their language will language has a chance of survival now that it has proven that it is a written language published in the mainstream. One community member told me that it was a good day to proudly display their cultural beliefs and traditions after hiding who they were for so long. That hit me hard as I knew exactly what that meant. Growing up as a daughter of an immigrant father who did not speak Setswana, the community always othered our family. This was the reason we did not learn our father’s language for fear of being othered. We wanted to wholly belong to the community and be seen as full Batswana. Although it did not take me as long as it took Ouma Katrina and her community to fully embrace my mixed ancestry, I know the feeling of not living as your true self. That is why I embraced this day as fully representative of me just as it was Ouma Katrina and her community’s day of celebration of more than a book launch.
