Scholar Leads African Language Learning Project to Recover Lost Knowledge [An article on Fallou Ngom's work at BU]

[Senegalese Studies Group/Groupe d’Études Sénégalaises]

Scholar Leads African Language Learning Project to Recover Lost
Knowledge
by Kenneth J. Cooper, October 15, 2009
http://diverseeducation.com/article/13121/scholar-leads-african-language-learning-project-to-recover-lost-knowledge.html


From his small office near the Charles River, Dr. Fallou Ngom can
envision the rewriting of much of African history, including the slave
trade. He knows, though, that he can’t do it alone.

Ngom, who was born in Senegal, is beginning his second year as
director of the African Language Program at Boston University, where
graduate students are learning to read and write five African
languages in a modified form of Arabic script.

The writing system known as Ajami, from the Arabic word for stranger,
is not traditionally used in language and African studies programs at
other universities. Ngom has set out to teach the script so scholars
can translate a massive amount of unread African texts, some dating to
the 10th century. He expects they will provide new information and
indigenous perspectives about the continent’s history, whose recording
has been shaped by travelogues and colonial archives in European
languages and Arabic.

“We are the first here in this country to teach our students in the
African languages that have Ajami script,” says Ngom, 38. “Our hope is
to be able to train the first generation of scholars who have access
to this literature and at least bring up the voices of those who have
never been heard — those about whom history has been written but have
not yet given their side.”

Ajami originated as a means to spread Islam across the midsection of
Africa just below the Sahara Desert, from Senegal and Nigeria in the
west to Ethiopia and Kenya in the east. Later uses were more secular —
history, genealogy, traditional medicine, and poetry. Today, some
shopkeepers use Ajami in their business records.

This year, about 30 BU students are learning Wolof (Senegal), Hausa
(Nigeria) or Swahili (East Africa) in both Ajami and the Latin script
used to write English. The center also teaches Pular (Guinea) and
Amharic ( Ethiopia) in Ajami.

Ngom says speakers of those and other African languages centuries ago
modified the Arabic script, adding special marks to indicate sounds
not made in Arabic. He compared it to putting a tilda above the letter
“n” to make the “ñ” in Spanish.

“Swahili was actually first written in Ajami language,” Ngom says.
“You go to Zanzibar, you’ll find a lot of Ajami Swahili.”

Not many texts written in Ajami are found in academia, though. Ngom
blames scholarly varieties of “Arab racism…and European racism,” which
falsely assumed that “the African has not written anything, and, even
if he did write something, it must not be interesting.” Some scholars,
he says, have dismissed Ajami writings as “unreadable Arabic.”

Ngom came to Boston University in 2008 as director of the African
Language Program and an associate professor of anthropology from
Western Washington University, where he taught linguistics. His
doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is in
French linguistics. He speaks more than a half-dozen languages.

He became drawn to learning more about Ajami after an incident in 2003
redirected his research. Ngom inadvertently left a window open in his
home in Bellingham, Wash., and found that a windy rainstorm had blown
some papers to the floor. On one sheet, his late father had recorded —
in Wolof Ajami — a debt.

The conscientious son tracked down the creditor in Senegal and paid
him. Ngom then reflected on how his father, because he could not write
French, was considered illiterate. He set out to uncover Ajami
writings that remained unread.

“Basically, Ajami would force a rewriting of various aspects of
African history, of interactions between Africans and the West, and
interactions of Africans in the east (of Africa) and Arabs,” Ngom
predicts. “That’s also going to affect our understanding of the trans-
Atlantic (slave trade) because there is still information that is not
known.”