Ajami: An Indigenous African Script, Born Over A Thousand Years Ago; Containing Scientific, Poetic, and Religious Thoughts of Various Afrikan Peoples.

Centuries before Europeans stept foot onto Afrikan lands, and centuries after, a unique writing system called Ajami developed and flourished in Afrika; beginning in the 10th century, thousands of years after Mdu Nter was invented in Kemet. The motivation for the use of the Ajami script was religious, similar to the Mdu Nter script used in Kemet. As Mdu Nter, which means ‘words of God’, promoted Kemetic religious thought, Ajami promoted Islamic thought. Eventually Ajami, just like Mdu Nter, went beyond the religious domain and began being written down to record academic knowledge, daily life, and historical events. 

During the period when nearly the entire Afrikan continent was colonized by European powers, and even after the post colonial government adopted the system of their former colonial overlords, majority of the Afrikan population was labeled ‘illiterate’ due to their inability to read and write French or English, languages which use the Latin script. The fact that many Afrikans were literate in Fula, Swahili, Hausa etc, using the Ajami script, went over the heads of government leaders. It didn’t matter if you could read and write topics in your own native language concerning astronomy, philosophy, ethics, poems, law, religion, medicine etc., if you weren’t literate in Western European languages you weren’t literate at all.

Initially, during the spread of Islam across Afrika, which occured during the 7th century, the Arabic script/language was widely read, written down, and understood for the purpose of reading the Quran, Quranic commentary, and Islamic history stemming from Arabia. A few centuries later, during the 10th century, Afrikans officially recognized the need for a script that would communicate knowledge, information, and history which existed in their own realities and native languages, instead of Arabic. This led to the development of a script which could represent various sounds and words spoken by Afrikans themselves in languages such as Wolof, Mandinka, Yoruba, Fula, Hausa, Swahili etc.

Ajami has its roots in the Arabic script, which was not able to represent certain sounds found in various Afrikan languages, therefore Afrkan scholars and intellectuals began redesigning certain letters to represent their unique accents. This redesigned script came to be known as Ajami. In the Arabic language, Ajami means “non-Arab” or “foreigner”. Therefore, when we mention Ajami it refers solely to a specialized script used to write specific Afrikan languages. There is Ajami Fula, Ajami Hausa, Ajami Wolof etc. This shift towards Afrikans writing in their own languages allowed literacy to spread faster, as learning how to read and write in their own languages was a much greater motivating factor to becoming literate than learning how to read and write in a foreign language.

This innovation led to a literary and cultural renaissance within Afrika. Writings containing medical diagnoses and treatments, religion, astronomy, history, scientific techniques, geography, morality, ethics etc began spreading across West and East Afrika amongst scholars and interested students. This renaissance was fueled by wise men and wise women who crystallized their thoughtful insight onto paper, allowing thier knowledge to be circulated and passed down to their descendants. Love poems, advertisements, contracts, and records were also writted in Ajami Hausa, Fula, Swahili etc.

For centuries Qu’ranic schools, which centered Islamic understanding, has been an essential form of formal education throughout Afrika and Ajami was the primary writing system used within these schools, along with Arabic, to transmit Islamic principles, values, and history; as well as a tool to spread historic and contemporary knowledge.

“A Poem on the British” was a poem written in Hausa Ajami, to the citizens of an empire, called the Sokoto Caliphate which was located mainly in present day Nigeria, by Sultan Attahiru I, the last independent ruler of the empire who reigned from 1902-1903. Sultan Attahiru I warned, in Hausa Ajami, the citizens of Sokoto that the British were the brutal oppressors and urged the people to migrate with him towards the Islamic holy lands of Mecca and Medina. He furhter wrote, in the Ajami script, “If they give you a gift, do not take it. It is poison that they give you, the poison of the British. They come teaching us to stop oppression. Yet they themselves are the actual opppressors, these British!”

In another letter, written in Mandinka Ajami titled ‘Mandinka Proverbs and Sayings’, authored by El Hadji Kemo Drame records the proverbial sayings of Mandinka people which are full of wisdom. Some of the proverbs witten down include:

“The cotton tree is bigger than the ax, but it is the ax that makes it fall.”

“A student does not know the experiences of his master, but his master has had the experiences of being a student.”

“For as long as there are diseases, there will be remedies.”

After being subjugated by European colonists, the Latin script forcibly replaced Ajami as the official script for many Afrikan languages, though groups who resisted European subjugation continued to use Ajami to spread information. The Mouride brotherhood was a movement and spiritual collective based in Senegambian region of West Afrika founded by Ahmad Babou Mbakke and established in 1883.

Members of this brotherhood often wrote about the teachings of Babou, their experiences, and philosophies in Ajami. The words that were written down could not be understood by the French, which allowed them to communicate freely and in an unrestricted matter. This made their movement that much more effective and efficient.

Thanks to the inventiveness and adaptability of Afrikan people, Ajami has led to the preservation of our historic reality in a form that is still able to be shared throughout the world. We can now, more thoroughly, travel back into Afrika’s intellectual, poetic, and historic path, laid out by Afrikans themselves. Because of Ajami we can now read documents written by individuals who the colonial governments intended to suppress or silence or render invisible or voiceless.Not only was Ajami useful for religious purposes, it was also a graceful way to document the thought, beliefs, and lives of everyday people since the 10th century up until today.

Currently, Ajami is no longer taught in schools, at least not in a widespread sense as it once was. At this juncture in its history, it is now being preserved by closed knit groups of people who deeply care and look to conserve their culture before it becomes completely erased. Ajami is still used throughout West Afrika, specifically by people who profess the Islamic faith, or generally by the broader population to communicate general information of a non-religious nature. Ajami is a gateway into making visible what has been too long been made marginal. Afrikan voices and perspectives. Afrikan history and culture, told by Afrikans themselves.

Writing allows us to freeze time. And our people have frozen time through not only script, but also through symbols, sculpture, and buildings. These frozen items have left crystallized legacies that we living today in the present moment can appreciate. What did our ancestors freeze into the essence known as Time? What did they want their descendants to remember or never forget? These literary works have been passed down for generations, in a closed knit circle of family relations. Many families are only literate in the Ajami script; reading, writing, and sharing letters which have been passed down for decades if not centuries all thoughout Afrika.