Unearthing a long-ignored African writing system
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.<p>After reading the article, I thought that reasearchers learned about the existence of Ajami just recently, far after the colonial powers were gone. That&#x27;s not true. In 1970, a museum was created in Tombouctou for collecting the documents in Arabic and Ajami. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timbuktu_Manuscripts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timbuktu_Manuscripts</a> (The French Wikipedia mentions &quot;Ajami&quot; for these manuscript, the English page only mentions &quot;Arabic and local languages&quot;). And there have been research publications about Adjami texts for many decades.<p>&gt; we’ve been told that these people are illiterate, [...]
&gt; their authors were code-switching throughout the text: writing in strict Arabic and in its modified Ajami form.<p>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 &quot;illiterate&quot; on someone that could write Arabic texts.<p>&gt; [The Mouride] were communicating messages that the French could not understand.<p>I don&#x27;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&#x27;s obviously a text, and the authorities would have found someone to translate it: there were scores of people who worked for the authorities.<p>Overall, this article could have been a nice and informative story, but it&#x27;s half PR bullshit, so I had to suppose anything int it was a lie until cross-checked.