Did Sub Saharan Africa have writing?
In fact, says Fallou Ngom, who grew up in Senegal, people in sub-Saharan Africa have used a written system derived from Arabic to record the details of their daily lives since at least the 10th century.
Did Africans have written records?
The history of Africa has tended to rely on written evidence. But Africans had their own particular system of recording past events, situations and traditions, before Europeans started writing about it. As a result, Non-African historians used written documentation to chart the history of the continent.
When did writing start in Africa?
Communicating through script and symbol ‘2 Yet writing – in the form of Egyptian hieroglyphs – emerged in Africa from the 4th century BCE. In Ethiopia, the Ethiopic script was developed in the 4th century CE, and in Sudan the Meroïtic script was created about 180 BCE.
Who said Africa has no history?
Even Hegel, in an apparent attempt to besmirch Africa, once asserted that “Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit” (Hegel: 1956, 99, The Philosophy of History).
Is this the most known writing in Sub-Saharan Africa?
This writing here is probably the most known writing in the Sub-Saharan Africa. Important archives from the Bamun kingdom written in ‘Shumom’ are available for consultation in the museums of Cameroon today.
What did subsaharan Africans not invent?
Before relatively recent contact with outside cultures, Subsaharan Africans did not invent the wheel, did not invent writing, developed minimal art, or agriculture, lacked musical instruments beyond simple percussion, and came up virtually empty in terms of math, science, and technology.
Are there endogenous words for reading and writing in African languages?
One of the observations that must be done before all is that in every African languages of Sub-Saharan Africa there are strictly endogenous words that designate the act of reading and writing.
What part of Africa wrote in Arabic?
Much of Africa wrote in Arabic script traditionally. It was ubiquitous in West and East Africa in particular, and we have fairly significant amounts of writings evidencing such. There’s something to the magnitude of 700,000 manuscripts from Timbuktu alone, and substantial numbers from other regions across the eras such as Kano.