محفوظ في:
| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
|---|---|
| التنسيق: | Recurso digital |
| اللغة: | |
| منشور في: |
Zenodo
2005
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| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17777955 |
| الوسوم: |
إضافة وسم
لا توجد وسوم, كن أول من يضع وسما على هذه التسجيلة!
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جدول المحتويات:
- <p dir="ltr">In this thesis I propose a re-reading of the history of writing that starts from a simple premise: humans are intelligent, therefore Africans are intelligent. Instead of asking why “<em>Africans did not invent writing,</em>” I assume comparable cognitive capacities and ask a different set of questions: where, how and under what pressures did African societies develop graphic systems, and why have these trajectories been so persistently misrecognised or erased in dominant narratives?</p> <p dir="ltr">Drawing on archaeology, historical linguistics, ethnography and oral testimony, I first argue that there are solid grounds to treat Africa as one of the cradles of writing, provided we adopt a functional definition that includes durable, conventional graphic systems used to encode structured meaning. Southern and Central African artefacts (e.g. Ishango), Saharan and Nile inscriptions, West African scripts such as Nsibidi, Vai and Bamum, Central African systems like Kiduma and lusona, and modern inventions (N’Ko, Mandombe) together form a dense field of graphic experimentation.</p> <p dir="ltr">I then propose a proto-classification of African writing systems according to their relation to language (phonographic, syllabic, logographic, ideographic, algorithmic), their morphology (pictorial, geometric, chromatic, recursive) and their social functions (religious, legal, commercial, artistic, clandestine). This classification is put forward as a heuristic map, not a definitive taxonomy.</p> <p dir="ltr">A detailed case study of Kongo revisits missionary accounts (Pigafetta, Cavazzi) in the light of Kongo memories and Nkole survivors’ testimonies. I argue that Kongo possessed a plural script ecology, including utilitarian Kiduma, and that colonial campaigns amounted to the forced burning of archives as a condition of conversion. During the Nkole resistance, Kiduma was adapted to the typewriter, turning Belgian contempt for African writing into an encryption method.</p> <p dir="ltr">The thesis then examines Mandombe as a contemporary geometric script emerging from this background: a system generated from a small set of strokes and operations (rotation, reflection, branching, concatenation, recursion), designed to encode tones and rhythms of African languages, and embedded in a non-indoctrinating pedagogical culture. Early observations suggest that Mandombe has significant cognitive effects on children’s visual, auditory and analytic skills.</p> <p dir="ltr">Finally, I treat a corpus of about fifty European and North-American texts on Africa and writing as an object of study, identifying recurrent habits I name Westernalism and colonial institutional entitlement. These concepts are proposed as working tools to describe how African scripts and scholars have been boxed, trivialised or silenced at corpus level.</p> <p dir="ltr">Ths research led me to conclude that any “universal” history of writing that ignores African script traditions is not incomplete by accident but shaped by specific institutional habits, and that rebuilding African educational and research frameworks requires reclaiming both our scripts and our right to define what counts as writing and intelligence.</p> <p dir="ltr">A simple falsification is the following: if the trope of african orality loses momentum and is replaced by a reasonable, nuanced view as for almost every other such large and heterogenous ensemble, then my thesis will be falsified. Which I hope to see. If however, it gains popularity and as I fear, polluates online forums on all conversations about african histories and cultures, then, it will sadly be confirmed.</p> <p> </p>