At nearly 90 years old, Pan-Africanist and Guyanese political activist Eusi Kwayana writes about visiting Liberia in 1965. Kwayana writes enthusiastically about asking to see the ancient alphabet of the Vai people. He writes: There was not much in-your-face political discussion in Liberia, or to be correct in Monrovia. I had read about the noted Vai community and tried to find a link to them. The official in the state department thought I was interested in the famed beauty of the Vai women, though, calling them girls. Instead, I told him I was interested in the Vai script (pictured), an indigenous alphabet, which had been unearthed and published possibly by the so-called missionaries. It took me three days of visits to institutions of museum and libraries before I actually ran in to a Vai woman in the Ministry of Information. She said, I am one of them. I told her about my search for the alphabet, and she was very pleased. She said I should see Old Man Kandakai, who was the real custodian of the script, but he was too ill to be visited. But come here tomorrow and I shall have one for you. And when I returned the next day, the woman had it ready. It was a real prize for me to take back to Guyana with an indigenous African script from a continent, which according to some European historians, never had writing. Their scholars have spent decades translating Egyptian hieroglyphics and reading the coffin texts but still they insist there was no writing in Africa! Read the rest of his interesting offering here:
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 19:15:00 +0000
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