The story is great, but there are many inconsistencies. I believe it was decorated to the point the facts were bent to follow the story.
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.
Yeah, I looked at the article expecting to find out about some writing system I hadn't previously known. Oh, it's Ajami? That's hardly news, it's been widely known (at least among people with an interest in such things) for a long time. E.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajami_script page is far from new.
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.
To be fair, the article claims that the guy first started working in this area in 2004, which is before the wikipedia article was created. bu.edu isn't trying to say that this is a new discovery this year/decade, it's discussing a particular academic's career.
That said, I'm 100% sure that the article is distorting (perhaps radically so) the background here -- these sorts of publications always seem to.
You are seemingly misinterpreting the article and even your Wikipedia link is speaking against you. The person being interviewed in the article started his work between 1996 and 2004, and most source/reference links in the Wikipedia page are from sources after this.
> But Arabic was well-known, and nobody would have tagged "illiterate" on someone that could write Arabic texts.
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?
> What Ngom realized—slowly, and then with a bang—is that his father’s notes were just the beginning. He had proof that a centuries-old writing system was still thriving in many African countries.
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?
Searching google books for Ajami and Wolfofal brings up a few things from the 20th century but it is hard to tell if they are referring to the writing or it is a name or google's OCR. Most of the hits for Wolfofal writing seems to be from the 21st century https://www.google.com/search?q=Wolofal+writing&sxsrf=ALiCzs...
Historic revisionism has become very popular so as to make everyone feel better about their ancestors place in the annals of history. That everyone was at the same level and made the same amount of contributions to the modern world, etc. And of course it was the singularly evil colonizers and their descendants that stole this history and claimed it for themselves, etc.
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.
Reminder that historical revisionism is fundamentally just about revisiting and challenging common assumptions and doctrine. It's not accurate to ascribe a common socio-political goal to all people practicing revisionism.
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.
Indeed. However I believe a lot of what is being not only published but rushed into curriculums is the political type. Examples kb ES would be the 1619 project or the trend in historical movies to aggregate a group of people into a single character but sell it as factual.
> Historic revisionism has become very popular so as to make everyone feel better about their ancestors place in the annals of history. [...] 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think that’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation of GP’s comment. They said you don’t need to feel better or worse about yourself due to what your ancestors did or didn’t do and when. It doesn’t mean nobody did any bad things or that we can’t learn from it, but that we shouldn’t let it cause more tribalism today.
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.
So I assume that you don't think there are persisting systemic inequalities due to such things as slavery?
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.
Which wrongs do you think we have yet to recognize? Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems to me that we (by which I mean modern American and European society) have taken a pretty thorough inventory in the last few decades, at least of our own failings.
Well, it's not a question of "if I were the winner" , that's a pretty dumb argument (excuse my French). Reestablishing fairness would still be the same issue with simply the roles reversed.
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.
Taking over land, goods and people is a very human thing to do, not localized to europe. There were nations (tribes, kingdoms, whatever) trying to occupy europe too, both from the south and east... and let's not forget the many many internal european wars and conquests.
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.
Rome assimilated tribes and peoples into its own, and the Western world tried
to imitate Rome's imperialism, as Spain did 500 years ago.
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.
No “excuse” is needed to bring science to the rest of the world. If you beg to differ, please explain how we would be better served by unscientific approaches to problem-solving.
IMO democracy is the least-worst political system, so no “excuse” is needed there, either.
I have to admit I got discouraged by the implausible narrative and didn't finish reading, so maybe it's addressed, but it seemed very strange to me that this scholar's father, his neighbors, and apparently many others around him, were engaging in writing without him ever noticing. He had "been told that these people were illiterate"...did he not grow up in that community? Why did his brother, who still lives there, not know about it? And how did he recognize that the script was written in his father's hand when he believed his father was illiterate? I really dislike this kind of info-drama.
Concur. I know absolutely zero about this field and got pulled in by the compelling story but started thinking “no way”. What do we call this? It’s not clickbait per se. A legal term that seems like it sort of fits is “puffing”.
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.
you have to understand racist effect of colonialism - intended or not. With western based colonial structures gaining ascendancy in late 1800s to 1960s, literacy de facto came to mean literate in western languages (or literate in native languages using western letters/alphabest). In many places, that remained the accepted definition of literacy even after the French/English/Portguese colonialists left. So it is very possible, that the author's dad would have been considered illiterate even though he was indeed very literate in a language and writing structure that is not western at all.
Do you really believe the racist effect of colonialism would cause this academic to not realize that his own father was producing Arabic script, which he himself is fluent in, on a regular basis? I don't doubt that a bunch of people may have been incorrectly classified as illiterate, but the personal narrative of this story makes no sense.
Come on, I didn’t downvote you but it is a lazy reaction to just repeat a tired label as if it explains something. All writing for the public tries to spice things up to engage the reader, some take it too far. We could talk all day about anti- woke hyperbole.
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.
There are some misleading points in the article. First of all, Ajam doesn't mean foreigner. It means "Mute". The story goes back to when Arabs invaded Persian Empire in the 7th century. Iranians (Persians) called the Arabic language "Tazi", which means dog barking (since a simple conversation in the Arabic language sounded like a dog barking to them). Arabs, in retaliation, called Persians Mute since they couldn't pronounce Arabic sounds. Since then, to this day, Iranians still mention Arabic texts and language as Tazi, although Arabs already gave up calling them Mute (Ajam)!
The second point is about "Islamic evangelists" spreading the religion. The writer forgot that the Islamic evangelists were also actively burning books and scrolls all over their newly invaded territory because all books were apparently useless except one book! (You know which book I'm talking about, I don't want to lose my head, I'm not name-dropping). As a result, in almost all Muslim countries (except Iran and Afghanistan), the written languages were lost forever and replaced by Tazi. So, whose fault was it? Who made hundreds of local written languages vanish? Local people themselves since they didn't bother to fight back against Arabic culture? Arabs since they shoved their holy book and unholy culture in every corner of local cultures? Europian who knew about all of this, but they lied and hid it to have their own exploitation plans? Or all of the options?
> Islamic evangelists were also actively burning books and scrolls all over their newly invaded territory because all books were apparently useless except one book!
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!
I don't understand how such a widespread writing system (as asserted in the article) could have been overlooked by the colonial rulers, let alone by anyone until 2004. I'm not saying it's not true, but if it is, the explanation is surely more layered that what can be explained simply by asserting colonialism/Euro-centrism, even if that is the root reason. It would be fascinating, and I'd like to hear it!
It wasn't overlooked and isn't overlooked. It is well-known.
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...)
It is quite simple to understand: Europeans had a vested interest in saying that Africans were all illiterate to justify its oppression. They just disregarded the written script as non-official and continued on this fantasy until very recently.
In this adaptation of Arabic script, it seems like the harakat (vowel markers) are obligatory, and much larger than standard Arabic. I always wondered why the pre-reform Turkish language forfeited vowel identifiers. It works for Arabic, but many other languages need vowels for disambiguation.
Interesting, reminds me of Sorani (Kurdish), with a script similar to Perso-Arabic , where only some, short vowels are represented using markers. This means that you end up with less connected characters which makes it visually stand out compared to say, Persian, Arabic or Urdu.
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 have observed that being exposed to learning to read the English alphabet as the first Latin Alphabet leads to bad habits when learning to read other Latin-based scripts later on. Even if English is not the mother tongue of the speaker. Dunno if that is the case for French as well, as it also uses the Latin alphabet in a peculiar way.
Yeah, In my experience understanding the history of the language and phonetics helps a lot with those situations. And, obv. things get easier with exposure to more languages as new patterns start to emerge.
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.
Ottoman authorities banned the production of Arabic/Turkish texts using the printing press in the 16th century. As a result, the first printed publication in the Ottoman Empire was in Hebrew!
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.
One book was printed in 1610 — a book of psalms. The article goes on to say that one of the first printing presses in the region was founded in 1734. You can find a list of the presses here, note that there is a lot more being printed in Armenian and Hebrew than in Arabic or Turkish:
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.
The Arabic script has vowel letters, but they are used for long vowels only when writing the Arabic language. However, it is not strictly necessary to use the Arabic script that way. Several other languages use it like an alphabet and employ the vowel letters as such.
Ngom, who studied Arabic as a second language (the second of 12 languages that the scholar knows), was stunned. He asked his brother, still living in Senegal, to check with the neighbor to whom their father owed money. Sure enough, his brother reported, the trader had a record of the debt, too, in a similar Arabic-turned-Fula script.
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.
You could be overestimating how much writing an average citizen of an African developing country performed during the 80s and 90s based on experience in your own life in the place and time you grew up in. Or it could be sensationalized.
In the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajami_script you can find references from 1971 and 1982. I find it hard to understand how this could be "an enormous discovery" in 2004. Nor do I understand the numerous mentions of European colonialism in the article.
It wasn't any enormous discovery. The particular academic in the article might have learned this thing existed from his father scribbles, but it has been a thing for centuries and has been studied in the past. They could have just learn about it by studing the literature.
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).
It seems to me like a significant discovery for the researcher. And it seems like he discovered something that is being deliberately hidden. I'm also curious about what "preoccupations" you're referring to. 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. (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 seems to me like a significant discovery for the researcher.
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).
From an American standpoint I (and in fact my government) is pluralistic and opposed to the idea of an official language, so if you tell me someone is illiterate because they don't speak the official language, you mean something different from what I mean.
Such a standpoint is not pertinent to Africa (and most parts of the world) though. In the regional reality, such people, on top of their poverty, have trouble participating in society and business above a certain level, precisely because of a language barrier.
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.
It was precisely "at a time when there was no google translator" that governments, and especially colonial French and British related governments, notorious for it, had a great supply of bureucrats, bilingual employees, and lower staff versed in both languages, supplementary translators, local spys, native aristocracy, allies, and enforcers, and even whole swaths of scholars studing the occupied cultures...
There are hardly mentions of colonialism, only where it fits. And that's the point, it seems: nobody bothered to look, apparently convinced in one way or another that the people were illiterate. So, it's an interesting and large set of documents.
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.
The discovery mentioned is not of the script itself, but the fact that lots of common people were extensively using it all over Africa. Previously, it was believed that this script was used by a small part of African population, as a result of its distant past. The author has provided samples of this in several countries, and for common use (like for his own family), something that was not believed to be true in modern Africa.
Indeed, just as French language and Latin-based orthographies for languages in this reason are the result of a colonial legacy, so too the use of Arabic as a prestige language (mentioned in this article) and an Arabic-based orthography.
But it was conquered by Muslim invaders, not Arabs, but Muslims, specifically the Almoravids [0].
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.
Did you read the article? European colonialism is directly relevant to the subject of the article and the connection is explicitly explained.
"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."
This article is bizarre. It reads like they've unearthed some long lost Rosetta Stone artifact from thousands of years ago. In reality, these people have "discovered" that everyone right around them writes using this language and this is just how they write and they all know about it. What is the "discovery" here?
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.
It's phonetic, and these are all living languages. All you need to know is what characters correspond to which phonemes and you need someone who can speak enough words of the language.
You need to know the languages. And then you pick up certain words, features or ways spellings are done. Even ignoring the more specific letters and diacritics, it is somewhat guessable what language is written with latin alphabet. Even if there is many of them.
Having spent a few months in Senegal, basically if it's on a sign it's probably Wolof, if it's in a Koran or religious school it might be Arabic (though many people can only read the Koran phonetically, they don't understand the language).
Through the phonetic. Here is a sentence in Wolof "No toudou?" Anyone who reads it and understands Wolof would know the language. I know because this is how we (I am Senegalese and Wolof) write to each other in WhatsApp.
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.