Telling our stories, in our own words and our own writing systems, is crucial to our identity as Afrikans. Westernisation has so afflicted the Afrikan psyche that some of us do not believe we have any accomplishments worth talking about, let alone being proud of. In 2013, I gave a talk titled “Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets”. I received many emails from young Afrikan designers at home and abroad wanting to know how they can mine the rich creativity that is imbedded in their culture. “There is no Afrikan design for us to reference,” they whined, “You keep talking of ‘looking within’, but we do not find anything when we do so.”
I considered this dilemma and realised there are several explanations: first, we lack published references. Afrikan architects, furniture designers, graphic designers – in fact all our designers and thinkers – must write books about their work, inspirations and dreams. There can never be too many books because the design field is dynamic and technology has ensured it will never be static. Second, governments in Afrika do little to acknowledge the power of writing systems or to promote their importance as unifiers and indicators of identity. Take South Africa for example. Its Bantu writing system was brought to light by Credo Mutwa in his seminal work, Indaba My Children. I discuss this in my book, Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika. Sadly, there has been no uptake from the powers that be; absolutely no expressions of interest in furthering our understanding of Afrikan writing systems.
Much could be learned from Canada which on its 150th anniversary had a new typeface designed and called it “Canada 150”. It includes scripts from the different indigenous groups found in the country. In South Afrika, most of the languages have special sounds that would require special glyphs that the Roman alphabet lacks. Why not create glyphs for all those click sounds, a task that could perhaps be made easier by referencing the Bantu writing system for instance? The typeface could be called “Azania 11”, in recognition of the 11 official languages in South Afrika.
In December 2014, I delivered a keynote at Autodesk University’s Education Summit in Las Vegas. This is an industry convention attended by thousands of artists and geeks from across the digital spectrum. I was introduced to a professor from MIT who had read my book. He wondered why Afrikans write their music using western notation? Why nobody has come up with a different system. He wondered if I had any interest in devising such a system. Hell yeah!
In my talk I spoke of the Ituri people of the Congo rain forest, whose men play a beautiful polyphonic music on xylophones as the women follow the rhythms and draw patterns on bark cloth. I called this a musical score. When we look at the sheets of bark cloth with the rhythmic patterns, we are actually looking at what is probably the first ever written music of Afrika! We die thirsting for knowledge, yet it is all around us. We don’t lack pioneers. We have giants like Fela, for example, who charted his own path creating the Afrobeat genre, a pungent gumbo of James Brown funk and African beats. What has worked so beautifully in music can and will work in other fields, especially in visual communication.
Swiss typography, seen as the influential powerhouse in typography, embodies the coldness of the country and its people. Less is more – the modernist canon – translates to a minimalist approach to all forms of design. They have a fascination with cleanliness and order – to the point where typographic design becomes anal, dead and soulless. Afrikan typography, on the other hand, is warm, humane, funky and unconstrained by the puritanical straitjacket! Some Afrikan writing systems are so intrinsically beautiful that whatever work they produce will by extension contain the same beauty. I am not suggesting literal translation of the writing systems here. Rather a metaphorical use, where one takes cues from a specific system but maintains the essence of the original font. The work becomes powerful when it’s inspired by a system rather than a simple literal translation or copy.
Afrika’s future lies in her past and her genius lies with those pioneering Afrikans from those cultures deemed primitive by Europeans. Any young Afrikan dreaming of creating the “new” Afrikan design, back to the future is the trip they must take. As the Persian mystic Rumi reminds us: “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others, unfold your own myth.”
This story, and others, features in the Chronic: We Make Our Own Food! (April 2017). In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.
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