School lied to us! Africa was not at all an “oral only” society

HAKIZIMANA Maurice

School lied to us! Africa was not at all an “oral only” society. We had our own “writing system”! It was not at all the European colonizer who brought us a writing system!

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Africa was not and has never been an oral tradition only as many scholars (including some African scholars) have always preached to us, from primary school to university! Sad but true, even those who were supposed to publicly refute this narrative had supported it and some still support it! [We are talking about linguists, African linguists in particular].

Those who continue to propagate this narrative in our schools and communities are either deliberately ignoring or simply do not understand a fundamental concept: A writing system because Africa has one of the oldest written documents and writing systems in human history.

What is a writing system?

A writing system is the notation of articulated sounds of a particular language or a representation of thoughts or ideas by fixing graphics called graphemes, signs or symbols on suitable media. A writing system is not synonymous with alphabets!

Here are a number of original African writings

1) Amharic of Ethiopia and Eritrea

Amharic is spoken throughout Ethiopia and southern Eritrea either as a mother tongue (by the Amhara people: 29 million people in 2018) or as a lingua franca by the rest of the population whose 85 different ethnic languages ​​also include Oromo, Tigrinya and Guragaki (the most represented in number of speakers, after Amharic).

2)Tifinagh which is the alphabet used by the Tuaregs (Sahel and Sahara)

Tifinagh is the script used by the Berbers to write their language, Tamazight. It is derived from the original scripts of the Berber languages ​​of southern Algeria and Niger among the Tuaregs, Libyan initially designated under the term Numidic – fallen into disuse for the Berber languages ​​of the North since Antiquity – probably through the ancient Tifinagh of the Sahara, of which it retains the morphosyntactic characteristics. Over the centuries, the Tuareg linguistic area (Algerian, Libyan, Malian and Nigerien Sahara) is the only one to have preserved this system of codification.

3)Adinkra – symbolic language invented and used to this day by the Akan peoples (Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gulf of Guinea)

Adinkra are symbols originating from West Africa that represent concepts or aphorisms. They were originally created by the Akan people

4) The shü-mom script of the Bamoun people of Cameroon invented by their king Njoya

The Bamoun or Bamoum script, also locally called the Shü-mom script and sometimes known as the script of King Njoya, is a writing system developed among the Bamoun people in Central Africa.

5)  The Suūdᾱnī, the Sahrᾱwī, the Sūqī, the Maghribī, the Sharqī of the ancient Mali Empire which are found in particular in the famous manuscripts of Timbuktu (16th century)

The first 3 of these scripts are still present and used in this modern era. The Bamoun script and those of the manuscripts are preserved in these two countries but they are not taught in schools.

Therefore, the statement that “Africa was an oral tradition” and that it did not know any writing until the arrival of the Europeans “lacks both intellectual and scientific evidence and honesty.

This world

HAKIZIMANA Maurice: II To follow my channel  Whatsapp https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaCyM5ILdQejDYwQ2b2u II To follow me on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/professormaurice/. 

Crédits :M. Mutabazi Mugisha