African Writing systems

Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika.
I am quick to confess that I am an easy sell-out to a top piece of print, yet at times this has been thwarted by unresolved issues that I hold with the graphic design profession. As an individual who mediates between art and design, I am careful not to shoot myself in the foot here. One such issue is the vagary of snobbery that implies the rights to a ‘correct aesthetic’ is maintained by elitist art-school practices. A stench occassionaly emitted when graphic design becomes ‘Graphic Design’: a term, notion and construct. Terms and definitions are important, as they have the potential to establish parameters of intelligibility by liberating relationships.



Where the relationship between the discipline of graphic design (by discipline I mean explicatory statements, abiding principles and methods of analysis including education as opposed to practice) and Africa appears to have little or no public harvest, overwhelming evidence such as my father’s ‘vault collection’ of TDK tapes and 12” vinyls belonging to an array of soukous and highlife artists and my mothers archive of Ovation Magazine — not forgetting the printed matter that’s produced and circulated in the continent’s metropolis, is hard to ignore. Celebrated designers such as Durban based Garth Walker have done well to also dispel this inaudibleness. Yet it is still a faint sound. So quietly, I went looking for a perfect level of pandemonium.

I was introduced to Saki Mafundikwa, a Typographer. Typography being that branch of graphic design concerned with how text appears in a given space (in its inception this space had always denoted the physical page: books, posters, newspapers and has now opened up to include vistas such as the screen). It is the method by which language is given visual form. Emil Ruder, the Swiss typographer, stated that typography as a technology “has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing”.



We can consider writing as a structure which has capabilities to support, prop up and make permanent. Without it the empires and numerable trades that rest on it would be non-existent. I believe it has become and continues to be both an agency and catalyst for memory, presentation, propaganda and growth. Engendering and making provision for identity, allowing the storage of vast amounts of information to be retrieved at will whilst bringing together disparate groups. Just that question alone has my mind wondering about the many encounters I have with writing on a daily basis.



If I am not writing I am reading, if I am not reading then I am writing. I think to read is to write. I am not referring to those instances where we pen a piece of text and you read over it, although still valid. I am pushing a symbiotic notion that when you write you are also reading, likewise in reverse. I don’t believe you can separate the two. Although dependant of one another and occurring simultaneously, neither one is a passive pursuit. In the sense that to write is to articulate; give form to thoughts, conversations and dreams. To do this, you need to comprehend that matter that you so desire to put down. Therefore before you can physically write you need to read within you, an activity that varies in time from person to person. The process is very true for reading. When you read, you write down, you make an imprint in your memory. Things become saved and sometimes overwritten. A process that is additive and accumulative. Each ‘performance’ of reading alters, whilst recording and writing a new or extended history.



What precedes typography, and by all means becomes its support structure, is writing. It is a representation of speech, mine, yours and the world over. The very utterance through which language comes. A complex system of communication wherein which writing is an integral part. To critically engage with typography one would first have to begin the process of mapping writing onto speech. Wherein lies the function of an alphabet.


Shü-mom characters from the Bamum script developed in Cameroon at the turn of the 20th Century by King Njoya.

Due to globalisation, the Roman alphabet, the most widely used writing system in the world, has domineered as an economic powerhouse. Yet the information age’s incessant use of web 2.0 technologies, having had a big impact on the way we communicate, has called for the creation of new web based fonts of many scripts. This has caused the Roman Alphabet used to write English and many other national languages to be in hot pursuit by Chinese and Arabic scripts in the digital realm. Attempts to meet the demands of access to information and new fonts are truncating parochial alliances virtual and real. These non western groups are now utilising communication in all its form to ‘resume historical trajectories independent of the West’.



On a smaller scale, but no less as powerful, other challenges to the Roman script are happening elsewhere. In 2003, the ancient Berber script used to write Tifinagh, the language of the Tuareg, the chief inhabitants of the Saharan desert, now found in Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mali and neighbouring countries, was adopted over both Roman and Arabic alphabets by the administrative Council of the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture to teach Amazigh in Morocco. Likewise the N’ko script used to write the Bambara language, spoken by people in Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Guinea, Mali and Senegal has been modified into an app for easy tweeting.



The last two are scripts indigenous to Africa. Despite colonial suppression they continue to be used today. Unfortunately that cannot be said about the majority of other scripts that were developed and used throughout the continent. There are infact many and they have a rich cultural and artistic history but as Saki puts it their story is little known and in some cases eliminated.

The Adrinka Symbols of the Akan people of Ghana. Adrinka means” goodbye” in the Akan language

Born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, Saki completed an MFA at Yale School of Art in 1984. He has since gone on to found Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Art (ZIVA), Zimbabwe’s only school dedicated to design and new media. Studying design under the tutelage of Paul Rand a seed was sown to look into African writing systems, and that he did. Twenty years later Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika presents a collated introduction into the history and development of more than twenty alphabets. Leading us through pictograms, mnemonic devices and syllabaries Saki charts how writing has and continues to evolve across Africa.



Aware that some of the systems documented do not satisfy the criteria to exist as an alphabet, he has nonetheless proceeded to call them as such. Contending for the place of pictograms, tally stick marking and scarification to be seen as forerunners of writing in Africa. Asserting the significant role that symbols have in African culture as forms of communication, citing calabash carvings of the Kikuyu of Kenya, the Ishango bone from Congo and the knotted strings of Nigerian Aroko as recordings of oral information. Therefore rendering void the idea that the majority of graphic symbols are purely decorative and instead advocating their place within agencies/mediums of communication. Apprehending such practices as proto-writing.

A selection of Bantu Symbols.
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I thought about making a new thread but will instead up date and add to this one many useful links provided by Xyyman
Please go here for further reading you will not be disappointed.
I know some here are designers like  Anastasiaescrava others cultural historians
below is a Ted Talks Vid by Saki Mafundikwa