Unearthing a long-ignored African writing system
bu.edu
bu.edu
After reading the article, I thought that reasearchers learned about the existence of Ajami just recently, far after the colonial powers were gone. That's not true. In 1970, a museum was created in Tombouctou for collecting the documents in Arabic and Ajami. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts (The French Wikipedia mentions "Ajami" for these manuscript, the English page only mentions "Arabic and local languages"). And there have been research publications about Adjami texts for many decades.
> we’ve been told that these people are illiterate, [...] > their authors were code-switching throughout the text: writing in strict Arabic and in its modified Ajami form.
The article claims the colonial system ignored the local writing system, so it thought that people were illiterate. But Arabic was well-known, and nobody would have tagged "illiterate" on someone that could write Arabic texts.
> [The Mouride] were communicating messages that the French could not understand.
I don't think the colonial authorities were stupid to the point of not realizing that a text written with an Arabic alphabet was not a text. I think anyone seeing this would have thought of Arabic. And anyway it's obviously a text, and the authorities would have found someone to translate it: there were scores of people who worked for the authorities.
Overall, this article could have been a nice and informative story, but it's half PR bullshit, so I had to suppose anything int it was a lie until cross-checked.
The article asserts that there are still considerable groups of people carrying on commerce in Ajami, and that the official governments in those regions don't recognize Ajami as existing as a script. Are you saying this is a lie, and that people who read and write Ajami are largely considered literate by their governments?
Or are you saying that this is a lie and Ajami isn't actually used in any significant way these days?
Not recognised as an official language is far from not being recognised as a script.
Who isn’t recognising it? This article is a story of personal discovery, not actual discovery. That’s why it’s a narrative press release. Not a paper.
To me it’s weird because it’s so unimportant. Who cares which groups of who were advanced or not and what they were doing back then. Anyone who feels better or worse about themselves because of this is weird.
It is accurate to say that there are groups who revise history to achieve the purposes you describe.
It would perhaps also be accurate to say that revisionists who propose histories that are more socio-politically palatable would be more generally successful.
The people colonizing those lands certainly cared at the time, and they used such beliefs to justify a lot of pretty awful acts. Given that the modern, western world is built on the legacy of colonialism, it's important (at least to me) to understand whether those motivating beliefs were true.
IMO, we’re all the same species, our history is littered with awful and good people, and lots of flawed people in between. The retelling of history can be a bit one-sided at times, but it’s sometimes unhealthy to fixate on it as an ongoing cause of problems today.
If I knew that everything I have is built on genocide, I would feel pretty wrong.
Those who do not are probably a bit strange imho.
If I knew that everything I have is built on genocide is called human history.
And I have a feeling that if the victims had been more lucky as to be the winners, they would have made more or less the same things.
It's a question of being humane and restablishing fairness of opportunities amongst human beings.
The status quo might be appealing but it can feed needless conflicts between people, sometimes on the sole basis of skin complexion.
I understand that burying one's head in the sand can be appealing but that still shows a lack of accountability and a reluctance to improve Humanity imho.
Well, isn't it? Human history is a bloody affair from the first days of farming to today. History is a long series of wrongs. How shall we undo them?
Possessions are depreciating assets. Even more when people don't know how to use them.
That won't be a solution but more of a bandaid over the long term if the goal is to reach fairness (equality).
When a country such as France helps installing the son of a former dictator at the helm of a country in 2022 (which leads to more than 200 people massacred, even on the premises of the US embassy since the regime is lawless) , I think there is a deep unaddressed issue, for instance.
Looking globally, europeans were really that much more advanced (in science, warfare, medicine, logistics,...) than the areas they managed to occupy... how else would a few people on a few boats occupy whole continents? Did those people do a lot of very very bad things (from slavery to genocide) ... sure. Was there some luck involved? Sure... the romans were more advanced than the occupying tribes and they still lost. But generally, the more advanced groups were the winners.
The rest of the Europeans living up in the North tried to do worse, not to assimilate the enemy culturally to build a bigger Empire, but to truly genocide it.
The short answer is: a lack of humility. Humility, which is a readiness to accept the truth (forget the common misconception which construes it as a kind of theater of lowliness), is need to accept history as it was. It is needed to accept the causes of things as they are or were, without rashness. Pride, which is antithetical to humility, leads people toward delusion, toward either chauvinism or denial and therefore away from the truth and toward agendas and what they want rather than what is in a way that is divorced from reality. So you can have chauvinists who will use their civilization's successes as a pretext to dominate others, and you can have envious people who belong to generally unimpressive civilizations and cultures who cannot accept the inferiority of their historical record according to various measures. We all know this to be the case, but we are often conditioned to fear admitting the obvious (we may be wrong in the details, but I have in mind the general principle that cultures and civilizations may be superior or inferior to others according to various measures). There is nothing to be gained from this prideful status game. If some culture or civilizations can teach us something valuable that isn't found in our own, however small or large, what conceivable reason could there be to refuse to learn from them? The only reason is pride.
So, it is not insignificant that some cultures and civilizations thrived while others did not. The fruits of a civilizations are useful clues, though naturally clues that require wise interpretation. And there is no reason why one cannot be grateful for the accomplishments of his ancestors, but this is gratitude, not bragging or condescension. Charity motivates a desire to share these fruits with others. And indeed, the colonial era was a period when that did happen, even if lots of bad things also happened. We lack the ability to accept that societies are mixed, that there are bad actors and good actors. The current anti-colonial narrative is characterized by a kind of embarrassingly anti-intellectual, reductive, boorish simplemindedness. That colonialism benefited the colonized in certain ways does not contradict the valid criticisms of what occurred during that era. Pointing out the positives is not colonial apologetics. The world is not a comic book in which the world is neatly divided into good and bad people, into good and bad groups.
It may well be that they're now unearthing (or paying attention to) specific Ajami documents that have been largely ignored. But the writing system itself isn't that obscure.
That said, I'm 100% sure that the article is distorting (perhaps radically so) the background here -- these sorts of publications always seem to.
Read the article again.
I did have a back-and-forth with Dang a while back about what to watch out for re press releases. He really helped me see the point of going steps beyond to the underlying research, when possible. I’ve tried to do that (or notice when others might have done it) with the most interesting stories, despite the extreme rabbit hole danger. Unfortunately, primary source papers can have uncompelling titles and then the while topic sinks. Still, I’d call that a fair result, and will sometimes flag them up (my own posts and others) for a second chance.
> He found this modified Arabic script everywhere. Shopkeepers kept records with it and poets wrote sprawling verses in it. Ngom discovered religious texts, medical diagnoses, advertisements, love poems, business records, contracts, and writings on astrology, ethics, morality, history, and geography, all from people who were considered illiterate by the official governmental standards of their countries.
It was apparently everywhere. The most charitable interpretation is they are putting a lot of weight into "illiterate by the official governmental standards of their countries." Which probably just means they couldn't speak/write French or lingua franca such as Arabic? Or maybe just the stereotypes existing outside of Africa, not that the local colonial workers never noticed it existed.
Still in wide use? It seems there are many inconsistencies and red flags to indicate a PR stunt. They just discovered a new system of writing that is in wide use?
There is no african writing system. Even less so using this alphabet.
It would be as ridiculous as claiming the discovery of some unknown Eurasian writing system, dated some 12 centuries ago.
Multiple writing systems were used throughout Africa, some likely totally native to the region , and some being the result of influences of one or many writing system coming from elsewhere.
In north Africa alone, Latin, Arabic, and before that some variant of phoenician was commonly used. All three even still used to this day. All used before, during and after the most recent colonies. Those of the French and the British who may have generalised the observations that people didn't seem literate when they got there. Authorities probably thought it would make a good narrative and justify their presence: bringing civilisation to inferior races. It isn't from me, that's exactly what some key figure of the "enlightment" period was claiming. Some moral obligation to colonise. Certainly convenient for some who figured natural resources over there could be quite useful to boost their ambition. Or desires for comfort provided by cheap labour.
African regions had numerous writing systems. To find African history, you would get better luck studying oral traditions. If writing systems is your funded research, start with what others had already figured out.
It's appalling "research" has fallen that low, this thing was actually funded and the result even published on some .edu domain.
Can you share a source for this claim?
Nahl, 89:
And We have sent down to you the Book as clarification for all things and as guidance and mercy and good tidings for the Muslims.
And here they went, they set fire on Big libraries of Egypt and Iran, thousands of years of knowledge went to drain simply becasue the book has knowledge about everything!
For instance, the story of this article is in Senegal where there is an official norm and effort to normalise ajami scripts for specific local languages [1] (many of the Wikipedia pages on the topic seem to be only in French).
Overall, the article feels very misleading and politically orientated. There's no 'discovery' apart from the fact that that guy didn't known about it, which is actually strange from a Senegalese person, whose father could write it, and who teaches linguistics. Maybe his father wanted him to be 'modern' and to get a good career and to study in French only (the Senegalese elite tends to speak better French and to know more about French literature than most French...)
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caract%C3%A8res_coraniques_har...
examples:
- Sorani: سوور sûr for red, که ر kar for donkey (note the double و and ه in the middle of the word), and
- Persian: سور sur (an old word for red, currently unused besides some festival names IIRC), خر khar (donkey)
This makes Kurdish actually much easier to read (non need to memorise the typical vowel patterns as in Arabic or Persian) since the writing is mostly aligned with pronunciation.
Weirdly enough, if we discard the current cultural context (English as the lingua franca) for a new speaker of an Indo-European language, learning Sorani from writing might be easier than picking up English (Ghoti and chips anyone?).
I'd always find it funny when be English friends would point our how difficult to read Polish is, where (with one small exception most native speakers wouldn't notice) the alphabet corresponds to the pronunciation.
This enormous act of self-sabotage probably kept the alphabets in the Muslim world from standardizing during the 1500s-1800s as the Europeans had, so variations in writing remained common. Pre-1400s texts from Europe look weird, too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media_in_Lebanon#Press
The link actually says its the first publication in the middle east.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_p...
Even in Lebanon the presses were introduced by Maronites; the Islamic authorities were apparently not fans of the technology. You will also notice the presses in Safed from 1577; it's likely that your 1610 example is referring to the first book, specifically. (EDIT: it seems that this 1610 example was also operated by Christians. Perhaps I should have said "Muslims [the majority] were banned from the press.")
Just for comparison, the first newspaper in Mexico started in 1539 (Mexico City), and the first in India in 1556 (Goa). The first book in the Ottoman Empire was printed in Constantinople in 1493. The Ottomans, then the largest empire in the world (until the Spanish conquest of Mexico), absolutely could have adopted printing a century before your date if they had just... wanted to. The list gives 1706 for the first continuously operated Arabic press in the Ottoman Empire at Aleppo.
I just felt the need to comment since I remember learning that factoid in my history class growing up and never had a chance to say it :)
What? How do you not know your father can write? How does your brother live somewhere his neighbors write the same language and doesn't know about it? What the hell is going on? This whole story is extremely suspicious.
Calling it an arab colony would be like saying Sweden was a roman colony because they use the roman script.
Sweden is not a particularly good example. A better example might be Latvia (or any of the other areas invaded as part of the northern crusades), which was invaded by a group of Catholics spreading the faith[1], Latvia could not be called a colony of the Papacy, but it certainly moved the area into Romes sphere of influence, with all the religion and language that entails.
It's more about getting more publicity for it, and getting the library and digitization program mentioned in the article going. That should have been the angle in the article.
>Nor do I understand the numerous mentions of European colonialism in the article.
They're examples of an appeal to current forms of orientalism and colonialism: just spin the story in an angle Americans and Europeans will be sympathetic to, because of their own preoccupations, in order to keep the grants going.
Focused on how these scripts were used for close to a millenium, before European colonialism was established in those parts, and arising under practical needs (they had the language, arabs had the script), wouldn't make such an enticing story to modern audiences.
Now peoples there speaking French or varieties of Dutch/German, or having their upper classes follow European norms and fashions and shun their own legacy, that's cultural colonialism in Africa (aside the economic, political, and millitary one).
A researcher not being aware of something openly used for centuries and already covered in relevant studies, research literature, symposiums (and even popular articles) well before they learn about it, does not quality them made aware of it as being a "discovery".
That's not how the term "discovery" works in an academic context, and certainly it's not what discovery as implied in the article means.
>People are preoccupied with alleviating illiteracy in Africa, it's interesting that these illiteracy figures may be inflated, and it makes me wonder what groups are trying to make Africa look more illiterate than it is, and why
The use of Ajami (which doesn't affect the kind of illiteracy people are concerned about, or even is widespread enough to be used as a substitute for it), and wouldn't much affect that concern (which is about people being able to participate in the official languages and writing systems of their country, and beyond that, for people going to school in general, beyond reading and writing).
>It seems at least in part some of the people classified as illiterate like it that way, since the government can't monitor your communications if it refuses to acknowledge they exist.
It's a system that has been used for half a millenium. It's not like it keeps any communication unreadable or even more difficult to read from the government (another incorrect information in the article).
The government just doesn't bother with it in any official capacity, precisely because it's not official. The same way some patois dialects are not part of many place's publicized literature, are not taught in school, are not used in official documents, and so on. Aside from that, anybody who knows the target language and is familiar with the arabic alphabet, can easily read it - which is exactly why it was used by "illiterate" people (meaning illiterate in the official, colonial or otherwise, languages and writing systems of their country).
Not that different from the US, come to think of it. There are some real multilanguage countries on Earth, where two or three or more languages have an equal footing, but that is not it.
The "American standpoint" might be "pluralistic and opposed to the idea of an official language" in abstract theory and as seen from an ivory tower, but see how far an immigrant just speaking their own language, even if that's as common in the US as Spanish, or some Native American or Cajun or whatever person not well versed in English, and see how far they go. Hell, even blacks from poor backgrounds, who do speak english, and for all the lip service to equality and opportunities, have to be deprogrammed to speak whiter english, and they undergo just that in university, if they want to work in any position from PR and finance sector, to law, public sector, the news, and so on. It's not about racism, even, it's more about classism: a redneck speaking like one would in rural country, with the dictionary, accent, mannerisms, and everything, wouldn't go far in the East or West coast either.
If the foreign government can only read French, it sure does it. Especially at a time when there was no google translator.
This should be the top comment. That explains everything about this piece's framing.
"Ajami, from the Arabic word ʿAjamī, meaning “non-Arabic” or “foreign,” was created centuries ago by Islamic evangelists to spread the religion to African communities. Over generations, it was adopted by members of anticolonial nationalist resistance movements throughout the continent, as French and English colonists installed their own languages and customs."
It didn't work that way.
The remark I found most interesting was that it wasn't taught at school, but that people seem to have taught it among themselves. The article doesn't mention any other form of teaching, but it might have something to do with the earlier Muslim colonization/proselytizing and the subsequent spread of the Quran.
Here's what I think: modern Western civilization - to say nothing of historical colonial societies - has attempted to pulverize these cultures utterly: it has removed their spoken and written language, music and art; altered their general societal structure; created a false narrative that they are "savages"; and so on. Some of these events are very recent, and some people involved are even still alive today.
Then, we like to do this thing where we go ahead and "study" the same people whose culture we just destroyed, pretending all the while as if it were an ancient civilization destroyed thousands of years ago through some natural process.
Tens of millions of people are walking around in Africa today who use this language. Now that we have "discovered" this, maybe some day we will also "discover" that they have music, art, jokes, and an entire culture.
No shade on Ngom, though, as I am sure he is doing his best to bring some of these things to light within the Western academic system.
not discounting your context, just grant seeking explains the article framing