The ADLaM Story – How Alphabet Changes Culture - Part Three

The final installment of ADLaM's three part series. To read the series in order, click here for part one.

In part two, we told the story of how Ibrahim and Abdoulay Barry developed an alphabet for their people, the Fulani. Here is the conclusion of that story:

Opposition to ADLaM

As the movement continued, the government began to take notice. Guinean officials couldn't read what was being distributed, so these books and newspapers become an issue of contention. Ibrahim was arrested and spent 3 months in jail for publishing literature in the Pular language with the ADLaM script. Upon his release he traveled to Senegal to visit other exiled friends and made the decision to come to the U.S. to further his education and continue to develop strategies for ADLaM.

Acceptance among some in the Guinean communities was slow or plainly oppositional.

“When I lived in Guinea, there was an antagonistic group, very much against this. They sent people to my house who told me, ‘Stop this or we’ll do something bad to you.’These were Fulani people, too, so I didn't understand. But I was nice to them, talked with them, and was polite. Finally, one of them indicated via email he wanted to talk with me alone. And when we met, he said, ‘I've realized what you are doing here is good, so I encourage you and am sorry for what I told you before.’

“There are some community leaders, though (New York City comes to mind), who don’t like it. And it’s a big problem. I went to see them, to show them progress we were making, and to convince them to help people back home to learn to read and write. And there was a guy, a fellow with a PhD in religion from Saudi Arabia, who, after I’d made some connections with the community there, stood and supported me when we were all together, but later privately went around to individual leaders in the group, and condemned my ideas, saying it would cause our religion to die.

“The problem, I learned, is that the Koran is supposed to be taught in Arabic, and for it to be learned any other way is regarded as erosion of the purity of the religion. Well, in West Africa, we've tried to learn Arabic for several hundred years, with indifferent results. It would be much easier, it seems to me, to teach and learn about the religion if we used our own language. My brother translated some passages into Fulani, and it helped a lot. But the religious leaders, the few who know the texts, want to be the interpreters, the shepherds, have the power. They don’t want us to read for ourselves and form our own opinions”(23).

Coming to America

In 2007, with a destination of Portland to be with his brother, Ibrahim left his home in West Africa to come to the United States.  On his way, he stopped to visit the Fulani community in New York. 

“I joined my brother in Portland after spending three weeks in there, and in Portland I first learned English language and worked for a high tech company. While working I was continuing to develop the ADLaM script. From this job, I saved most of my paychecks in order to pay for the first ADLaM software. After ten months of working and saving, I was able to pay for the first ADLaM keyboard software. A year later, I went back to New York after we had the first software developed in order to show it to the community. I also went back again during the summer of 2009 for three months to teach the Fulani language and the ADLaM alphabet”. New York has become a learning center and the headquarters of the organization “Winden Jangen”(24)  which is a non-profit group promoting the further support and dissemination of literacy through ADLaM.

The software that Ibrahim developed enabled him to write more books in ADLaM for the Pular language. At this time, about 2008, Ibrahim decided to enroll as a student in Civil Engineering at Portland Community College. “Being an engineer is an old dream which I had since my childhood. When I was a kid whenever we traveled from my hometown of N’Zerekore to my parent’s native region, it would take as many as 3 weeks and sometimes more than a month to travel on just over 700 km because of the state of the road. During those trips, I use to think of how one day I will study about fixing those roads”(25). 

Encountering Calligraphy 

Portland Oregon is home to Reed College. Steve Jobs spoke of taking classes in Calligraphy there in his now famous address to the Stanford University graduating class of 2005. Jobs related how these classes had a profound effect on the development of fonts in the burgeoning Apple Computer interface(26).  As Ibrahim continued his studies in Engineering, he continued to have a desire to refine the forms of ADLaM. He had a similar experience in noticing Calligraphy as Jobs did all those years ago: “One day I saw posters made by calligraphy students and the letters were so beautifully crafted. I was very impressed by what I saw and I thought that having the skills that these students have could be very helpful in re-designing and improving ADLaM”.  

Rebecca Wild was the teacher of that calligraphy class and recalls meeting Ibrahim for the first time: “The first day of each term I ask my students, ‘what brings you to a calligraphy class’?  The responses range from, ‘I want to improve my handwriting,’ ‘I want to be able to decorate cakes with text,’ ‘I want to use it as a tattoo artist,’ ‘I need an art elective.’ Never has a reply impressed me like the one that the quiet man with the French accent gave… He had used his limited funds to have a font designed using his alphabet.  But the results disappointed him.  The forms were crude and lacked beauty.  It was the font technician that suggested he take a calligraphy class to learn about subtle nuance and detail”.

This class allowed Ibrahim to learn different aspects of the calligraphic form and apply it to ADLaM. He began, as did the scribes throughout history, to make adjustments in his script to create uniformity, rhythm and as a result the forms have greater flow in readability and in the writing of the text. The alphabet continues to evolve as it is developed for new applications.

Rebecca proved to be a nexus in some of the next steps in the ADLaM journey. She related Ibrahim’s story to the Portland Calligraphy Society, who happened to be hosting the International Lettering Arts conference that year, which is where our story began. As a result of that meeting, Ibrahim and I were invited to make a presentation for the next conference “The Summit” held in Colorado Springs in 2013; this article is derived from that lecture. 

Modernizing text for today’s use

One of the goals that Ibrahim has for ADLaM includes digitization for a presence on the internet. This has to be accomplished through a conversion of the script to Unicode. In addition, mobile apps will be

important for future communication in today’s ever changing technological communication age. The presentation at The Summit Conference led Ibrahim to be able to make connections that helped him with further skills in font design and contacts that eventually made it possible for him to obtain digital programs like Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator to facilitate those designs. A further connection enabled him to obtain an introduction to the team at Cal Berkeley that can help him develop the script into Unicode which will allow ADLaM to have a presence on the internet. As of the writing of this article, an app has been developed for smartphone with an ADLaM based text. Yet still, an overriding need is to raise funds to produce textbooks for traditional education. 

Back to basics – How Alphabet Changes Culture

Plainly, the ability to read and write, something we take for granted every day, can have an enormous impact on a people and society. In the case of the Fulani, it has the ability to change the socio-economic structure of the tribe. Preservation of tribal history and lore through the ability to transcribe into a writing system that reflects their native tongue will allow cherished traditions to continue and heritage to be preserved. Even now, as you are reading this, a new literacy is being spread throughout the traditional Fulani tribal region and beyond. One example of something we take for granted every day illustrates how ADLaM is changing a culture. Ibrahim, responding to a question after our lecture, relates that many women have come to him and thanked him for teaching them to read and write; they now can make grocery lists when they travel to market (sometimes great distances away) enabling them to buy only what they need instead of returning home to find they have forgotten one thing or that they already had another.  This simple ability enables a family to save much needed currency – over a period of years this can make a significant difference in their ability to educate children, provide proper nutrition or obtain needed household goods or services.

A Reevaluation of Alphabet - The Letters we work with

In the exploration of modern Calligraphy as an art form, we have reversed the process and gone back to explore, at one level or another, the distillation of letterform from character to the basic structure of individual marks. This exploration is an artist’s attempt to innovate and as an artist I love the process, yet this encounter with Ibrahim causes me to frame these marks we make with a new seriousness and in a fresh light.

Ibrahim and Abdoulaye Barry

The ADLaM website states: “If language is the vehicle of culture, then writing is the vehicle of language”.  The spoken word is transitory… it is here for a moment and then gone forever. The original, overriding concept of a writing system is communication among a people through time and space.  Ibrahim and Abdoulaye began with a problem to solve; communication and education was their goal, and ADLaM was created to give their people greater opportunity to be a part of those aspects of society. 

Please consider with me– what if we had no writing system? Would you develop your own? How? What forms– what tools would you start with? Do you think that you, one person in a sea of many, could have an effect on an entire culture, to change their lives for the better? 

Woodrow Wilson’s words seem appropriate to this subject: “You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand(27)."  

Randall M. Hasson is an artist whose work combines traditional imagery with calligraphy to form “Paintings that inspire conversation”.  He has taught and or lectured at 12 International Lettering Arts Conferences since 1998. He resides in Santa Fe, NM.

www.randallmhasson.com

Ibrahim Barry (with his brother Abdoulaye) is one of the co-creators of the Pular language alphabet ADLaM. He is currently a student of Civil Engineering in Portland OR. The Winden Jangen organization is the non-profit vehicle for the support and dissemination of ADLaM. 

www.windenjangen.org

This article ©2014 Randall M. Hasson and WindenJangen.org; All rights Reserved. To reproduce all or part, please contact the author info@randallmhasson.com or go to www.windenjangen.org to contact Ibrahima Barry with your request.

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Footnotes

[23] Barry, Ibrahim - excerpt from a transcription of a Spring 2010 interview  “Ibrahim Barry Conversation” with Timothy Leigh; The Timothy Leigh Company, Portland OR. http://www.timspens.com/ 

[24] Winden Jangen Adlam is a not-for-profit organization formed for the purpose of promoting literacy and education in Africa and around the world by providing access to learning and information through alphabetization using the ADLaM Script. http://windenjangen.org/

[25] Barry, Ibrahim – text from lecture given at ‘The Summit”, The International Lettering Arts Conference; July 2013, Colorado Springs College, Colorado Springs, CO.

[26] Jobs, Steve. "You've got to find what you love." Stanford University Commencement Address. Stanford University. Palo Alto, CA. 12 Jun 2005. Address. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

[27] Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) 28th US President

The ADLaM Story – How Alphabet Changes Culture - Part Two

The second installment of ADLaM's three part series. To read the series in order, click here for part one.

The first installment was a development of a brief history of Alphabetic writing,why it is important to this story, and how modern calligraphy played a part in leading up to the initial meeting with Ibrahim Barry, one of the creators of ADLaM.  

When Artistic Theory Meets Practical Reality

Reed College in Portland Oregon was the site of the 2012 International Lettering Arts Conference “Calligraphy Northwest”. During this week-long conference, amidst the swirl of students, teachers, friends and colleagues, there was a quiet individual most of us had not seen before. At a certain point in the midweek, there was an organized evening function for the purpose of the instructors of the various workshops to demonstrate their own brand of calligraphic related art. In my case, I chose to do a dual demonstration with a calligrapher from Canada who is a master of the Greek forms from which I derived my own alphabetic explorations . While Georgia Angelopoulos and I were at our table demonstrating, this quiet man came over to see what we were doing and ask about a book I had laying on the table called “Afrikan Alphabets”(15). 

His only comment got our attention: “You know, these are not the only alphabets in Africa today”. 

Randall Hasson (with Georgia Angelopoulous) - first conversation with Ibrahim Barry

After finding a bit more about Ibrahim Barry, we agreed to meet for lunch the next day. He related the story of how he and his brother invented a new alphabet for their people.“You mean you adapted an alphabet for your language?” I asked. “No, we invented the alphabet to suit the sounds of our language” he responded. “Wait, you mean you took someone’s alphabet and worked it into your language?” “No, we designed all the letters ourselves.” 

After I asked him the same question three different times in three different ways, he pulled out his original copy books from the first writings that were the development of an original, alphabetic script. A script developed in 1997 by Ibrahim and his brother Abdoulaye. When they were teenagers. A script now being taught and disseminated, beginning in the West African country of Guinea and spreading among their Fulani tribe all over the continent. We are not talking about the Phoenicians of 3,000 years ago here; we are talking about a new, vital, developing system of communication; an alphabet, from scratch, by hand, now - today-  in our own present, modern, technological age.

The Fulani

The Fulani (or Fula) tribe is the world’s largest extant nomadic people. Their territory ranges from the west coast of Africa to the banks of the Nile and the Red Sea. While a great number of Fula dwell in cities, the nomadic nature of this culture means that while the language creates cultural continuity, the discontinuity of the writing systems makes this people an almost illiterate society.  A Muslim people since approximately the year 1000, all Fulani learn to read the Koran at the age of 7, but most only know how to recite it. Currently, it is estimated that 75% of the Fulani have actually lost their native language.

A country of western Africa on the Atlantic Ocean, Guinea is inhabited by the Fula and two other major people groups. Guinea came under French control in the 19th century, becoming a French colony in 1893 and a part of French West Africa in 1895. Guinea gained its independence in 1958. The official government language is French (which children learn in school) with religious texts, records and other documents historically written in Arabic. Fulani who lived outside of their villages or towns were only able to hear from their relatives or parents through letters carried by travelers. These letters were written in their native language (called “Pular”) using the Arabic script that the tribe has used since embracing Islam. However, the Arabic alphabet does not contain all the Pular sounds and some of the sounds for the Arabic letters did not exist in Pular, therefore there was a lack of standardization in writing that led to a wide diversity of character use. Consequently, neither the French nor Arabic languages nor their writing systems (despite the adaptability of phonemes referred to in Part One) have successfully been able to match and graphically record the sounds of Pular so that the speakers of those languages could write and read them effectively. 

Remember how that first alphabet had branches that went both east (towards Arabic) and west (towards Greek)? Here we have a confluence of two differing alphabetic cultures fighting for supremacy, actually contributing to confusion and ultimately resulting in an extremely high rate of illiteracy in this nomadic, tribal people.

Translating Letters – Ibrahim and Abdoulaye

The town of N’Zerekore was home to young Ibrahim, his brother Abdoulaye and their family. In Guinea, education was a privilege not a right; many people did not get a chance to go to school. There was usually someone in the town that would have to decipher and read the letters that arrived from various places around the Sahel. Translation was a difficult task (remember, because there is no codification in the writing system, there is no consistency in how the letters were written). As Ibrahim and Abdoulaye were growing up their father filled the role of town translator and reader.

Eventually both Ibrahim and Abdoulaye became so good at deciphering these letters that their father turned the task over to them. Abdoulaye in particular began to ask “Why don’t we have an alphabet that is for our own language? He then became determined to develop one. Sometimes great things come from humble beginnings. In this case, two boys put their heads together - in their own house, in their own room - and began naively to believe they could develop a writing system for their people.

Invention of writing system

“You see things; and you say “Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”(16)

First table of the “ADLaM” alphabet as it is today

  In 1987, Ibrahim and Abdoulaye shut themselves up in their room and began to make marks. Sometimes they would close their eyes and recite “un deux trois” as they moved their pencils, then open their eyes to see what they had made. As these marks developed, they picked out marks that looked like the sounds of their language. These signs were refined to individual glyphs, which then in turn formed the letters of the alphabet. The writing system developed and they decided to try to teach this new system to their sister; once that worked they knew they could teach people to read and they moved on to teach their mother. As the alphabet matured they settled on 28 individual letters(17)  and then began to teach the town women and children at home. The image from 1994 at left is the first table of the “ADLaM” alphabet as it is today(18). 

1st Generation ADLaM copybook

Early copy books written by hand were used to teach the growing number of students. From the first rudimentary pages in 1989, Abdoulaye continued to refine the format of the books during the period from 1990 to about 1998. Many of the books in this first generation contained traditional stories learned from their mother and from both French and Arabic schools.

 Winden Jangen

The second generation of books came about as Ibrahim and Abdoulaye moved to Conakry, the capitol of Guinea to continue their studies. In Ibrahim’s own words: “…this was beginning of the second era of the ADLaM. We created with our students and friends a new organization called “Winden Jangen ”(19) (Write and Read), and started producing new books which became the second generation of ADLaM books. In this period we did not only write, we would also teach every day after school. My father continued printing and selling them without no profit and some giving free for the people who didn't have money to buy them.”(20)

2nd Generation ADLaM copybook

Still written by hand and then printed, these new textbooks added illustrations to the text to teach the Fula readers a variety of fundamental lessons in subjects like water filtration and prenatal care. Again, from Ibrahim: “These kinds of books made ADLaM very popular with many people knowing how to read and write and buying them and teaching them to their friends and parents”(21). ADLaM continued to gain popularity and the young Ibrahim and Abdoulaye continued to travel and teach. 

Ibrahim (center) and Abdoulaye (rear) teaching ADLaM in the market ca. 1991

“When my brother started this, I was not helping him much. He was writing a lot of books, mostly by hand, himself. But after that, when I was at the university, I started working with people, teaching them how to read and write in Fulani, and as this written aspect of familiar sounds dawned on them, they often started crying. I also taught them the basics of Math, how to run a small business, how to use a calculator. And they were so happy I decided I would continue to do this because I was making a change in their lives. I could have studied further, advanced my career like my friends, made money, but I stopped everything of my own and dedicated myself to writing, writing, writing. It occurred to me before long that the best way for people to study and learn the language was by using a grammar, something we didn’t have. So, I began to pay close attention to the structure and construction of Fulani and to write a grammar book, our first ever”(22).

In 2003 Abdoulaye came to the U.S. for the purpose of pursuing a Master’s degree and earning money to continue to support the cause. The movement’s strength continued to grow under Ibrahim and led to the formation of learning centers and schools in Guinea, Togo, Senegal, Ghana and Benin in Africa and to the Fulani community in New York in the U.S. Eventually, Ibrahim was able to typeset ADLaM. In addition to the ability to print textbooks, he started a Pular language newspaper called “Karanbol” (“The Pen”), garnering support from a local Guinean businessman who underwrote the cost of production.

Continue reading - The conclusion: "Opposition to ADLaM"
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Footnotes:

[14] Calderhead, Christopher, and Holly Cohen. The Encyclopedia of World Calligraphy. 1st. New York: Sterling, 2011. 72 - 75. Print. - Georgia Angelopoulos'exemplars were the main starting point of my writing exercises in calligraphic Greek forms

[15] Mafundikwa, Saki. Afrikan Alphabets - The Story of Writing in Afrika. New York: Mark Batty, 2007. Print.

[16] GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Back to Methuselah, act I, Selected Plays with Prefaces, vol. 2, p. 7 (1949).

[17] Initially they created 27 individual letters, and added a 28^th character later. "We chose to write from right to left because of how important this is in the Fulbhe culture which is heavily influenced by the Islamic and Arabic culture. However, instead of diacritical marks as in Arabic we chose to have consonants and vowels as in French or English”. http://windenjangen.org/what_is_adlam

[18] A D L and M are the first four letters of the alphabet from which ADLaM takes its name.

[19] http://windenjangen.org/

[20] Barry, Ibrahim – text from lecture given at ‘The Summit”, The International Lettering Arts Conference; July 2013, Colorado Springs College, Colorado Springs, CO.

[21] ibid

[22] Barry, Ibrahim - excerpt from a transcription of a Spring 2010 interview  “Ibrahim Barry Conversation” with Timothy Leigh; The Timothy Leigh Company, Portland OR. www.leighcompany.com

The ADLaM Story – How Alphabet Changes Culture - Part One

The first installment of ADLaM's three part series.

This installment is a development of a brief history of Alphabetic writing, why it is important to the ADLaM story, and how modern calligraphy played a part in leading up to the initial meeting with Ibrahim Barry, one of the creators of the ADLaM alphabet.  

Setting the stage: Lettering Arts and Calligraphy today

 Lisa Engelbrecht - Masthead for The Society for Calligraphy, Los Angeles CA 

Within the wider world of art and craft, the subset of the Calligraphic Arts has organizations represented in many parts of the world. At the local level, calligraphy societies and guilds hold meetings, host workshops and create an atmosphere where the art and craft of lettering can be taught. Through society newsletters and international publications like Letter Arts Review, articles on the traditions of Alphabet and artwork with innovation in letterforms provide a stimulus to artists all over the world. These societies provide the root system to foster the growth of the Calligraphic Arts and individuals within those groups use letterform as artistic expression.

Randall M. Hasson -
Lettering Demo with Brush on Canvas Board

On an annual basis, Lettering Artists from around the world with a variety of skill levels come together to participate in an International Lettering Arts Conference. Traditionally held at a College or University in the summer, these conferences provide a venue that allows for an even more participatory “conversation” around the use, adaptation and innovation in the area of Lettering Arts and letter development. Some of the finest lettering artists around the world come to teach these workshops and provide lectures. Classes range from learning to write traditional styles of alphabet to the abstraction of writing and the incorporation of text into a wider application of artwork including traditional letter formation, layout and design, painting, journaling, bookmaking, gilding and type design. Some of the best of these classes can be transformative for participants, and the evening lectures add to the insight and excitement of what is happening in the greater world of Letters.

It was at the 2013 International Lettering Arts Conference in Colorado Springs that I was privileged to be asked to give a talk about two brothers from western Africa who began using an alphabet to change a culture. This is the story of how that came about.