Unearthing a Long-Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans

By Molly Callahan, The Brink

BU anthropologist Fallou Ngom discovered Ajami, a modified Arabic script, in a box of his late father’s old papers

When his father died in 1996, Fallou Ngom returned to Senegal from where he was teaching French and linguistics at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash. Ngom participated in the funeral services, spent time with his family, and collected some of his father’s belongings to bring on the daylong flight back with him. 

A box of his father’s old papers—various to-do lists, dashed-off ideas, deeds, receipts, and other ephemera that collect throughout a life—lay dormant in a corner of Ngom’s office for nearly a decade before he opened it. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but waiting for Ngom inside this box was a scrap of paper that would alter the course of his life and the lives of countless others.

In 2004, when he dusted off the box and sat down to sift through these tokens of his father’s life, Ngom found something confounding: a note, scribbled in his father’s hand, about a debt he owed a local trader. The note was doubly surprising. First, Ngom had thought his father was illiterate—he didn’t read French, the official language of Senegal. But the note wasn’t in French, it was in a script that looked like Arabic, but sounded like Wolof, a regional West Atlantic language. 

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“That’s when I realized: we’ve been told that these people are illiterate, and they’re absolutely not,” says Ngom, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences professor of anthropology.

Ngom needed to know more. He applied for a postdoctoral fellowship in 2004 to travel to West Africa and dig into this surprising writing system. Tellingly, it was BU’s West African Research Association that granted Ngom’s postdoc—albeit years before he would join the University’s faculty. 

Read about Ngom’s journey to Africa to learn about this writing.