{"id":51275,"date":"2021-06-21T10:14:30","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T15:14:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51275"},"modified":"2021-06-21T12:48:48","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T17:48:48","slug":"african-illiteracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51275","title":{"rendered":"African (il)literacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article is so revelatory, at least for me, that I wish I could copy it entirely.\u00a0 Since that's not what we do at Language Log, I will just quote the opening portion (probably less than a quarter of the total essay), while pointing to a few additional highlights, and encourage others who are interested to read the whole piece (4,700 words):<\/p>\r\n

\"Africa writes back<\/a>:\u00a0 European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong\", Aeon (6\/17\/21), by D. Vance Smith, edited by Sam Dresser<\/p>\r\n

Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known \u2013 Phoenician, Latin and Arabic \u2013 while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only<\/em> as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it\u2019s possible that it\u2019s an ancestor of modern Berber languages \u2013 although even that\u2019s not clear \u2013 the script is usually called Libyco-Berber. Found throughout North Africa, and as far west as the Canary Islands, the script might have been used for at least as long as 1,000 years.<\/span> Yet only short passages of it survive, all of them painted or engraved on rock. Everything else written in Libyco-Berber has disappeared.<\/p>\r\n

Libyco-Berber has been recognised as an African script since the 17th century.<\/span> But even after 400 years,<\/span> it hasn\u2019t been fully deciphered. There are no long texts surviving that would help, and the legacy of the written language has been one of acts of destruction, both massive and petty. That fate, of course, is not unique. It\u2019s something that\u2019s characteristic of modern European civilisation: it both destroys and treasures what it encounters in the rest of the world. Like Scipio Africanus weeping while he gazed at the Carthage he\u2019d just obliterated, the destruction of the other is turned into life lessons for the destroyer, or artefacts in colonial cabinets of curiosities. The most important piece of Libyco-Berber writing was pillaged and sold to the British Museum for five pounds. It\u2019s not currently on display.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n

But Libyco-Berber also reveals a more insidious kind of destruction, an epistemological<\/em> violence inflicted by even the best-intentioned Europeans. There are numerous stories of badly educated, arrogant Europeans insisting that Africans not only never did, but never could, write books. Even as sensitive a philosopher as the French sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who had deep personal ties to Algeria, and who supported the Berber\/Amazigh cultural movement, could essentially make the same assumption. He insisted that the Kabyle people<\/a>, whom he lived among and studied for years, were pre-literate, although they used (and still do) the characters of Libyco-Berber. Bourdieu\u2019s is a cautionary tale for intellectuals who are committed to social activism. The passion \u2013 the need \u2013 to do what\u2019s right is all too often steered by the conviction that, precisely because we\u2019re intellectuals, we know<\/em> what\u2019s right. For Bourdieu, for example, the very ability to think, to reflect about what\u2019s right, is tied to literacy.<\/p>\r\n

But Bourdieu\u2019s observational mistake \u2013 the idea that the Kabyle weren\u2019t literate \u2013 is actually not his most consequential misapprehension. That would be the idea that literacy is a supreme cognitive and cultural achievement. It\u2019s one of the means by which universities shore up the value of their intellectual work \u2013 they police grammar, philology, literacy \u2013 in short, they define and champion rigour and \u2018standards\u2019. For those of us brought up within that system \u2013 even brought up, as I was, in a former colony (Kenya) \u2013 those standards might appear to be value-neutral. But they\u2019re value-neutral only because they annihilate even the possibility of other values, of other modes of thinking or being. When Bourdieu went from the elite \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure to a Kabyle settlement, he saw, ultimately, the absence<\/em> of what made the university, and his own mind, what it was. That supposed absence is the product of intellectual arrogance, yes, but it\u2019s also part of a European cultural heritage.<\/p>\r\n

There\u2019s a depressing familiarity to the assumption made by Europeans that Africa is a site of lack. But that supposed lack is something that Europe has counted on since the destruction of Carthage. Indeed, the destruction of that ancient city by lake Tunis could lay claim to being the very lack at the centre of European intellectual culture. But that\u2019s another story. At one point, Carthage was poised to become the greatest empire on Earth. It failed only because the great Carthaginian general Hannibal didn\u2019t destroy Rome itself when he invaded Italy. If Hannibal had succeeded, Punic rather than Latin might have been the language of European intellectuals until the post-Enlightenment. Bourdieu\u2019s own language might not have been a \u2018Romance\u2019 language at all, and his most famous term, \u2018habitus<\/em>\u2019, might have been a Punic word. But then his whole project wouldn\u2019t have assumed Africa to be a place deficient of literacy. Bourdieu might have been studying pre-literate Romans instead \u2013 or never have had the chance, as a member of a pre-literate group in the remote mountains of southern France.<\/p>\r\n

More than four decades ago, I embarked on a serious study of the history of writing in the world, for my own edification.\u00a0 I never had any particular intention to publish my findings, and the many notes I made are still in boxes and folders in my \"dungeon\" (study).\u00a0 I remember that I paid a lot of attention to an ancient African script called Tifinagh<\/a>.\u00a0 The author of this article also devotes several paragraphs to Tifinagh, of which this is the first:<\/p>\r\n

The name \u2018Libyco-Berber\u2019 is really just the name of the supposition that modern Tamazight (Berber) languages descend from it. Two other names, Numidian and Old Libyan, are used less frequently, but they don\u2019t smuggle in the assumption that we know much about the language itself because of the continuity of the script. The script it was written in, however, has been taken up recently as the official script of the Amazigh movement in the Maghreb, which is fighting for greater recognition of the Tamazight-speaking peoples. They call the script tifinagh<\/em>, a word that\u2019s often taken to mean \u2018Punic letters\u2019; -finagh<\/em> is derived, perhaps, from Latin punicus<\/em>. Another etymology argues that it\u2019s the plural form of afnegh<\/em> in Tamazight that means letter\/character\/sign; the verb \u2018to write\u2019 is efnegh<\/em>. The first derivation frontloads the supposition that the script is<\/em> derived from Punic writing; and, to separate both its form and its origin from Carthage, scholars tend to use the terms Libyc or Lybico-Berber to describe the ancient script.<\/p>\r\n

In the course of delineating the history of writing in Africa, the author also presents some remarkable methodological insights that weave together such diverse, yet interrelated, strands as narratology (storytelling), historiography, teleology, and pedagogy.\u00a0 Here's an example of his elucidating exegesis:<\/p>\r\n

Even if Bourdieu hadn\u2019t invoked the German sociologist Max Weber<\/a>, the underlying assumptions of Marxist historiography \u2013 that history is a dialectical elaboration, a development \u2013<\/em> are clear. Storytelling is replaced by something like capitalism, the \u2018mode of accumulation\u2019 and the \u2018production and reproduction\u2019 that writing allow. But Bourdieu does<\/em> mention Weber, and in doing so implies that what\u2019s being developed is more than just economic institutions: it\u2019s the \u2018process of rationalisation\u2019. Weber means by this something like the overwhelming array of bureaucratic and technological mediations that seem inescapable in European and American modernity, if not almost everywhere in the world. But Bourdieu\u2019s use of the term here also implicates a corollary assumption about the Kabyle: that they lack<\/em> this \u2018rationalisation\u2019, even that they lack the faculty of fully \u2018developed\u2019 reason itself. Bourdieu is of course not overtly, or even consciously, endorsing crude historical schematisations of cultural development, but those schematisations are the consequence of thinking about writing without asking about its history. Merely to ask \u2018When does writing begin?\u2019 or \u2018How does knowing how to write change things?\u2019 is to require some kind of narrative of fulfilment or completion.<\/p>\r\n

What sort of scholar could write such an illuminating foray into the history of writing in Africa?\u00a0 It turns out that he is not an Africanist nor a linguist, but rather a European medievalist.\u00a0 Here is a brief biographical note on the author, Professor D. Vance Smith, a medievalist in the Department of English at Princeton:<\/p>\r\n

Ph.D. University of Virginia. D. Vance Smith is a medievalist who grew up in Africa, learning isiNdebele along with English as a member of the Khumalo clan of the amaNdebele.\u00a0 Attending an all-African high school in Kenya, he also spoke Kiswahili and early Sheng (the Kenyan street vernacular). Before graduate school, he wrote two ethnographies on groups of people living in what is now the South Sudan. What he thought of as biographical contradictions\u2014becoming a medievalist of Western Europe despite little direct exposure to Europe except as a postcolonial subject in a Kenyan government school\u2014have become the subject of a full-scale project on Africa and the Middle Ages.<\/p>\r\n

(source<\/a>)<\/p>\r\n

If I were ever to teach a course on the history of writing, I would definitely make Smith's profoundly learned and penetratingly perceptive \"Africa writes back\" required reading.<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n