One Text, Many Forms -A Comparative View of the Variability of Swahili Manuscripts Edited by Ridder H. Samsom and Clarissa Vierke Editors (original) (raw)
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European colonialism and missionization in Africa initiated a massive orthographic shift across the continent, as local languages that had been written for centuries in Arabic letters were forcibly re-written in Roman orthography through language standardization reforms and the introduction of colonial public schools. Using early missionary grammars promoting the " conversion of Africa from the East, " British colonial standardization policies and educational reforms, as well as petitions and newspaper editorials by the local Swahili-speaking community, I trace the story of the Romanization of Swahili in Zanzibar, the site chosen as the standard Swahili dialect. While the Romanization of African languages such as Swahili was part of a project of making Africa legible to Europeans during the colonial era, the resulting generation gap as children and parents read different letters made Africa more illegible to Africans themselves.
Paths into script formation in the ancient Mediterranean, 2018
West Africa is a fertile zone for the invention of new scripts. As many as twenty-seven have been devised since the 1830s (Dalby 1967; 1968; 1969; Rovenchak, Glavy 2011, inter alia) including one created as recently as 2010 (Ibekwe 2012; 2016). Talented individuals with no formal literacy are likely to have invented at least three of these scripts, suggesting that they had reverse-engineered the ‘idea of writing’ on the same pattern as the Cherokee script, i.e. with minimal external input. Influential scholars like E.B. Tylor, A.L. Kroeber and I.J. Gelb were to approach West African scripts as naturalistic experiments in which the variable of explicit literacy instruction was eliminated. Thus, writing systems such as Vai and Bamum were invoked as productive models for theorising the dynamics of cultural evolution (Tylor [1865] 1878; Crawford 1935; Gelb [1952] 1963); the diffusion of novel technologies (Crawford 1935; Kroeber 1940), the acquisition of literacy (Forbes 1850; Migeod 1911; Scribner, Cole 1981), the cognitive processing of language (Kroeber 1940; Gelb [1952] 1963), and the evolution of writing itself (Crawford 1935; Gelb [1952] 1963; Dalby 1967, 2). This paper revisits the three West African scripts that are known to have been devised by non-literates. By comparing the linguistic, semiotic and sociohistorical contexts of each known case I suggest various circumstances that may have favoured their invention, transmission and diffusion. I argue that while the origi- nators of scripts drew inspiration from known systems such as Roman and Arabic, they are likely to have drawn on indigenous pictorial culture and annotation systems to develop their own scripts. Once established, their creations were used to circum- scribe alternative politico-religious formations in direct opposition to the discourses of colonial administrations. The appeal of these scripts was thus tied more to their relative indexical power than their apparent technological or cognitive advantages. Just as earlier theorists imagined, I contend that West African scripts do have the potential to illuminate historical processes of creativity, transmission and evolution, but only when local particularities are given due consideration.