The alphabet as ideographic art.

Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika by Saki Mafundikwa Mark Batty Publisher, May 2004 $34.95, ISBN 0-972-42406-7

Although the alphabet as we know it today was first scribbled down during the Middle Ages (the earliest known alphabet dates back to 1700 B.C.), Saki Mafundikwa believes there is yet room for another. His own artistic sensibilities propelled him into this realm of thought. As a graphic designer, typographer and teacher, Mafundikwa says that the "the letters and symbols we write with are extremely important to a visual communicator like me."

In Afrikan Alphabets, the author introduces a number of ideographs, pictographs and scripts devised and designed by Africans to express and represent a voice sound, a word, or an idea. His mason for researching and creating the book is not simply to present a now aesthetic, but to inform readers of the various African writing systems used to convey an action or a concept, and to represent the spirit of its users. (There is a brief though unfortunately unclear discussion about substituting the letter "k" for "c" in the word Africa.) And it makes sense, too, as other cultures (Arabic and Chinese come to mind) have used symbols and words that embody an idea or state of being for ages. Mafundikwa spent 20 years journeying from places such as Calabar, Cameroon, Havana, Lagos, London and Suriname to study the beliefs, cultures and religions of peoples from the African Diaspora; from his travels he has identified many syllabaries, or "writing system[s] composed of characters that represent syllables ... that can be combined to form the spoken words."

Mafundikwa, a Yale graduate and founder of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigitel Arts in Harare, offers the fruits of his labors in Afrikan Alphabets. The book is well researched and colorfully illustrated, and it includes both histories and images of vadous writing systems created by Africans across the continent. Some, such as Ethiopic, date "from thousands of years ago," he points out. Others, like the Somali alphabet, which was created in 1922, conlinund to evolve until the early 1970s, and was used in higher education in the country as recently as 1985.

While the actual writing down of both words and symbols--be it on paper or stone--is a way of recording and preserving the values and thoughts of a people, this tiny and unpretentious book does more. In an easy to grasp delivery, Afrikan Alphabets not only educates readers of a means of communication, it also enlightens them of an ingenious yet little-known aspect of African art and culture.

Clarence V. Reynolds