The Writing Systems in Pre-colonial Africa

The neo-colonial school system has taught and keeps teaching Africans that orality is only means by which blacks used to transmits knowledge and memory. This is utterly false, first because Africa offered writing to humanity but also different types of writing were created all over Africa since antiquity till date. One of the observations that must be done before all is that in African languages of sub-saharan there are endogenous words that designate the act of reading and writing.

For example:

For example:

In swahili : Read is
Kusoma, Write is Kwandika

In Lingala: Read is
Kotanga, Write is Kokoma

In Bambara: Read is kalan, Write is sebe

In Fulani: Read is Janguigol, Write is windugol

In Yoruba: Read is Kika, Write is Kiko

We can see that in some of the most important languages in Africa there are words without Arabic or European influence which expresses the act of reading and writing. So, how come black people have words for the act of reading n writing if they don’t read and write? The simple linguistic analysis allows affirming without a doubt that reading and writing were known in Africa before the foreign invasions. We will analyze the system of writing known in the continent.

The Bamun writing in Cameroon

Important archives from the Bamun kingdom
written in “shumom” are available for consultation in the museums of Cameroon
today. The bamun writing was so much alive that the savant Njoya used to use it
for his comics. The problem with the shumanm writing is that it is said it was
invented by the king Ibrahim Njoya who lived in the beginning of 20^th
century.

He had the idea to create it while being in
touch with Arabic speaking Fulani and hausa lettered men, and shumom appeared
to him in a dream. Yet Cheikh Anta Diop identified 7 common signs between the
ancient Egyptian writing and Bamoun writing, consequently, if Njoya developed
this writing, clearly he didn’t invent it. The Bamun are Nubian descent, they
may have therefore perpetuated their ancestors writing from the Nile valley up
to the bank of the Nile River.

The Mende writing in Sierra-leone

The writing contains 212 signs. According to
the official version, it was revealed in a dream to a Mandinka mason called
kisimi kamara in 1921. Again, Theophile Obenga reported the extence of 9 common
signs between the Egyptian writing and the Mende: If the basis of Mende writing
therefore existed before Kisini Kamara, he definitely developed it.

The Bete writing in Ivory coast

According to the Western Historiography, the
Bete writing was invented by the man of knowledge Bruly Bouabre who passed in
2014. He would have reportedly invented alone, in 1948, 448 syllabic signs for
his native language and used it to write tales. The Bete writing here is pictographic,
it is to say it takes back drawing like those in Egyptian and Mende writing. A
more broaden study would reveal without a doubt common signs between this
writing and these of the whole continent. Bruly Bouabre probably wasn’t the
investor, but we might think that he was an initiated man to whom was taught
the writing‘s fundamentals of his ancestors.

Ge’ez writing in Ethiopia

Ge’ez is without a doubt the most used and
most living writing in Africa. It is older than the Christian era. Ethiopia’s
patrimony was preserved by the emperor Menelik II, the man who chased the
Italian invaders out of histerritory and made Ethipia the only African country
not political colonized. Today Ge’ez is everywhere seen in haile selassie’s
country.

Nsibidi writing in Nigeria/Cameroon

Regarding this writing mainly used by the
Efik people of southern Nigeria, the researcher P.A Talbot tells us that “the
Nsidibi writing is certainly very antique, and to a large measure,
pictographic. Theophile Obenga reported ten common signs between Nsidibi and
ancient Egyptian which will make one seek for its origin in the Nile valley.

Gicandi writing of Kenya

It was first reported to the world in 1921.
It belongs to kikuyu people, which is the largest ethnic group in Kenya. It
must be noted that there are three common signs between Gicandi and ancient
Egyptian.

Conclusion

We can see that Africa is not only at the
origin of writing, but the survival of this practice since the end of the
civilizations of Nile valley remained strong. The incomplete list of writing we
have browsed is already important: there are certainly others that have
disappeared along 500 years of the apocalypse that fell on the continent.

Moreover, it is interesting to see that
several of these writings are originating from Nile valley: this reinforce more
of the notion of the common identity of sub-Saharan Africans. Therefore not
only that Africa has oral traditions, but written one too.

Reference: http://en.lisapoyakama.org