Communication in Africa and its Influence

It is quite evident that African "traditional" cultures and modes of communication have demonstrated a capacity to use new communication technologies and, in the process, to transform both themselves and those technologies. This challenges many of the simplistic generalizations and dichotomies about African cultural and intellectual history. Writing specifically about literacy and orality, Eileen Julien is critical of those who regard orality and writing as exclusive domains and successive moments in which the oral represents Africa's authentic expressive form. She argues that there is nothing intrinsically oral about Africa, that orality and writing have continually influenced each other for a long time, as Albert Gérard (1981) and Harold Scheub have shown in their exhaustive studies. This intertextuality can be seen in the works of contemporary African writers who deliberately appropriate oral forms to serve literary artistic ends.

Among the earliest African societies to develop writing as a method of recording and transmitting knowledge and information were Egypt, Nubia (whose Meroitic script [2nd century B.C.E.–5th century C.E.] has yet to be deciphered), and Ethiopia. In these early literary traditions, writing and reading were confined to a tiny religious and political elite. In Egypt, hieroglyphic writing began about 3000 B.C.E. The literature of the Old Kingdom (2650–2152 B.C.E.) was largely didactic, dominated by the "wisdom" genre. Literary genres multiplied during the Middle Kingdom (2040–1640 B.C.E.) to include more intricate literary forms such as novels, satires, and autobiographies, as well as political and social commentaries and philosophical discourses. During the New Kingdom (1539–1069 B.C.E.) a new literary genre emerged—the love poem—and writers began to abandon classical language and to write in the colloquial language of their time. Later, a new literature known as Demotic (meaning "of the people") developed, and, after large numbers of Egyptians had converted to Christianity, a Coptic literature emerged emphasizing religious themes.

Ethiopian writing (in a language called Ge'ez) began in about 500 B.C.E. It grew when the Kingdom of Axum became Christianized (c. 400 C.E.), following the conversion of King Ezana in 330 C.E. The Bible was translated from Greek into Ge'ez and other religious translations were produced. The "golden age" of Ge'ez literature, according to Gérard (1981), was between 1270 and 1520, during which both religious and secular writing flourished. Between 1314 and 1322, the clergy, in support of a new dynasty, wrote the Kabra Nagast (Glory of Kings), reportedly the most venerated book in Ethiopian history. Royal chronicles, in fact, were an important genre of Ethiopian writing until the beginning of the twentieth century. In the fifteenth century, local hagiographies began to appear as nationalist homage to the holy men of the Ethiopian Church. Ge'ez writing waned from the sixteenth century, to be followed three centuries later by the development of writing in Amharic, the commonly spoken language in Ethiopia, which flowered in the twentieth century, incorporating new literary and intellectual trends.

The Arab conquest of North Africa (661–750 C.E.) ushered in a new period in African political, religious, and cultural history. It brought Islam and the Arabic language and script, which altered the modes of communication of ideas and Africa's links to the wider world. Muslim North Africa gave the continent and the world its first universities, the mosque universities of Ez-Zitouna in Tunis (founded in 732), Quaraouiyine in Fez (founded in 859), and Al-Azhar (founded in Cairo in 969). Lulat argues that these universities influenced the development of the modern European university, which acquired five elements from the Muslims: (1) a large corpus of knowledge; (2) rationalism and the secular investigative approach of natural science; (3) division of knowledge into academic subjects; (4) the notion of the university as a community of individual scholars; and (5) the idea of the college. He concludes that "the modern university that was brought to Africa by the colonial powers is as much Western in origin as it is Islamic" (p. 16).

North African intellectuals produced a vast body of scholarship in a wide range of fields, from the natural sciences to poetry and history, and some of the world's most renowned minds including Ibn Batuta of Tangier (1304?–1377?), the traveler who visited numerous countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa and wrote extensively on his explorations, and Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332–1406), the historian who pioneered secular history in his monumental Kitab-al-'Ibar (Universal History) and three-volume Muqaddimah (Introduction to History).

Through trans-Saharan trade, Islam spread from North Africa to West Africa, where it began to make significant inroads in the eleventh century. Centers of Islamic learning emerged, including the mosque university of Tombouctou established in the twelfth century, where numerous works were produced, such as Ta'rikh al-Fattash (Chronicle of the Researcher) and Ta'rikh al-Sudan (History of the Sudan), written by Mahmud Ka'ti (b. 1468) and Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di (1596–1656), respectively. In addition to writing in Arabic, West African scholars also wrote in African languages using Arabic script, writings that are called Ajami. Examples include the Kano Chronicle and the Gonja Chronicle, produced in modern-day Ghana in the eighteenth century. Arabic and ajami writing flourished in nineteenth-century Hausaland. Usman dan Fodio (1754–1817), the leader of the Islamic reform movement that created the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest state in nineteenth-century West Africa, and his brother and daughter, wrote hundreds of books and treatises on law, theology, politics, finance, history, and poetry. Senegal also produced illustrious scholars and religious leaders, among them the legendary Amadou Bamba (1850–1927), whose works remain popular to this day.

Arabic and ajami writing also spread to the east African coast and Madagascar. Malagasy ajami writing was well established by the time the first Europeans arrived in the early seventeenth century, although it did not achieve the status it did in West Africa or among the Swahili along the east African coast. Ajami was gradually supplanted by Roman script from the 1820s as part of the Merina kingdom's (1787–1896) ambitious modernization drive. Swahili writing, whose origins have been dated to the thirteenth century (if not earlier), produced a vigorous literature, mostly poetry and historical chronicles, such as the sixteenth-century Kilwa Chronicle. Classical Swahili literature entered its golden age between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, during which the work of several writers stands out: Saiyid Abdallah b. Nassar (1720–1820), Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (1776–1840), Muhyi 'l-Din (1789–1869), and Umar b. Amin (1798–1870), who wrote religious and epic poetry. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Swahili writing was confronted with a new challenge in the form of European imperialism.

The vast corpus of African writings in Arabic and ajami (much of the latter is scattered in private holdings) across the continent contains important records of African contributions to human knowledge in general and Islamic scholarship in particular. As with early and contemporary Christianity, Africans have made significant contributions to Islamic thought almost from its emergence in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century.

The coming of Europeans in the fifteenth century, during the infamous Atlantic slave trade, crystallizing into colonization from the mid-nineteenth century, marked yet another watershed in the development of African writing and in the technologies of the communication of ideas. European Christianity was especially critical in the introduction of new cultural practices and writing to many languages that had previously had no written tradition. In Southern Africa, for example, the written literature of the Zulu and Xhosa dates to the early nineteenth century, and most of the works were initially religious in tone, including translations of the Bible and books such as Pilgrim's Progress. Later, a more secular and anticolonial literature emerged, especially in journals and newspapers. Dictionaries and historical works were also produced. A vibrant local language literature also developed in West Africa, especially in Ghana and Nigeria. Particularly impressive was writing in Yoruba, consisting mostly of fiction, drama, poetry, journalism, and historical works, such as Samuel Johnson's (1846–1901) landmark History of the Yorubas (1921).

The nineteenth century also witnessed the development of new African scripts, especially in West Africa, the most famous being the Vai script invented by Duwalu Bukele (1810–1850). Even more consequential in the long run was the development of African writing in the European languages, especially English and French, a subject that is exhaustively discussed in the edited collections by Albert Gérard (1986) and Oyekan Owomoyela (1993), among others. Initially, African writings in the European languages concentrated on autobiographies such as Olaudah Equiano's (1745–1797) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). In the nineteenth century, scholarly works began to be produced by such intellectuals as Edward William Blyden (1832–1912), author of tomes like A Vindication of the African Race (1857) and Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887), which had a permanent influence on African thought.

In the twentieth century, as colonialism became entrenched, European language writing and communication spread to all aspects of African cultural and social life and became a definitive part of African literature, scholarship, education, and public discourse. The use of European languages continued after independence, a period that saw an explosion in education at all levels. For example, the number of universities increased from forty-two in 1960 (many of which were in North Africa and in South Africa) to more than four hundred, enrolling about five million students, by the beginning of the new century. Although a vast improvement compared to the colonial era, this still represented a relatively low enrollment ratio of less than 5 percent.

The mastery of the European languages by Africans can be seen in the fact that several have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and other prestigious international awards, and many African academics are among the leading figures in their respective fields. In fact, claim the authors of Africa and the Disciplines, "research in Africa has shaped the disciplines and thereby shaped our convictions as to what may be universally true" (Bates, Mudimbe, and O'Barr, p. xiv). Some see the European languages as a force for cultural unification, national integration, administrative efficiency, modernization, and globalization, while others contend that the dominance of these languages erodes Africa's linguistic and epistemic autonomy and its ability to define itself, pursue development, and entrench democratic rights in a situation where the languages of tuition, government, and business are not indigenous and spoken by the masses in daily life.