Appreciating Africa’s Scripts
Language has always been a critical component in helping a person establish his/her identity, which is why conquerors in bygone eras would often impose a stay on any communication that would use the language of the conquered people. By such means conquerors intended to wipe off the conquered peoples’ sense of identity. The native language was stifled, and the language of the conqueror elevated to the high pedestal previously occupied by the native language.
It is an acknowledgement of the significance of language in establishing identity that Geoffrey Chaucer’s magnum opus, The Canterbury Tales, often receives praise for simply being written in English. This may not make sense to many, given the overwhelming number of books and documents written in English, but the book, written towards the end of the 14th Century, was written at a time when the preferred language of communication was Latin or French. This was the aftermath of French rule on the English, which started in 1066 and lasted a good 300 years. In that period, English was a vernacular language, spoken by the peasants, while French or Latin were the official languages of communication.
I have digressed a bit to show the importance of language. One aspect of language that affirms one’s identity is of course a script to transcribe the language. A script developed to transcribe a language, even if derived from other scripts, is a source of great national pride, which is why a country such as Turkey developed the Turkish alphabet from the Latin alphabet; this apparently served it better than the original Arabic script, which could not effectively convey Turkish words.
In Africa, the two scripts that are predominantly used to convey language are the Latin alphabet and the Arabic script, and one would be forgiven for thinking that with the exception of Ge’ez, there are no African scripts. Ge’ez is a script that is used in Ethiopia and Eritrea and has been in use for millennia. It is a wholly native script that is often used for Semitic languages such as Tigre, Tigrinya and Amharic. It’s also been used to neighboring Cushitic languages such as Blin and Oromo.
Over the centuries, several African communities have often developed their own scripts, such as the Aka-u-ku of the Bamum people in Cameroon. This was developed under King Njoya, who wanted to make his subjects more familiar with their rich history. During the colonial era, the learning of the script was stifled by the French, but there have been attempts to revive it.
The Aka-u-ku script itself sought inspiration from the Vai script. This script was developed in Liberia by the 1800s and has been in use to date. It is mostly used to write the Vai language, which has more than 100,000 speakers in Liberia and slightly over 15,000 in Sierra Leone.
Another script that served as a springboard for the development of Aka-u-ku was ajami, an Africanized version of the Arabic script.Ajami has been in use since the 15th century, and even though its use is in decline, it is still important among the Hausas of Nigeria.
West Africa is the source of yet another script, the Bassa Vah script, which is believed to have been developed around the 3rd Century BCE. The Bassa of Liberia and Sierra Leone used it as an encrypted system of communication to avoid slavers, but some were caught, and the language and its script was exported to South America, largely Brazil and West Indies. It was suppressed by colonial powers and almost became extinct.
It is unique from many other African scripts in that it is a full alphabet, having characters to represent both vowels and consonants.
Going north, the Tuaregs have had their own writing script, Tifinagh, for milennia. Derived from the ancient Phoenician alphabet (which was the source of the Latin alphabet through the Greek alphabet), the tifinagh script was written right to left, and even down to up; its modern form, neo-tifinagh, is written left-to-right, and is starting to gain popularity, with the standardization of its alphabet and the gradual introduction of texts written in it. In the 1980s, writing a book in neo-tifinagh would have landed you in jail in Morocco.
A linguistic trip around Africa will show that there have been, and still are many African scripts all over, from the N’Ko script used by the Bambara, Maninka, and Dyula (Guinea, Mali and Ivory Coast) to the Mwangwego Script in Malawi.
Who knows, as Africa reestablishes its identity insofar as the use of language is concerned, Cheikh Anita Diop’s visions will be getting closer to being fulfilled?
By Matengo Chwanya
Sources: African holocaust, Worldhistoria , Taneter, Scriptsource, Omniglot, Open.edu
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