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.
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.