---
title: "History of science and technology in Africa"
chunk: 16/21
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_Africa"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:12:40.805209+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Northern Africa and the Nile Valley ===
Africa's first writing system and the beginning of the alphabet was Egyptian hieroglyphs. Two scripts have been the direct offspring of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Proto-Sinaitic script and the Meroitic alphabet. Out of Proto-Sinaitic came the South Arabian alphabet and Phoenician alphabet, out of which the Aramaic alphabet, Greek alphabet, the Brāhmī script, Arabic alphabet were directly or indirectly derived.
Out of the South Arabian alphabet came the Ge'ez alphabet which is used to write Blin(cushitic), Amharic, Tigre, and Tigrinya in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Out the Phoenician Alphabet came tifinagh, the berber alphabet mainly used by the Tuaregs.
The other direct offspring of Egyptian hieroglyphs was the Meroitic alphabet. It began in the Napatan phase of Nubian history, Kush (700–300 BCE). It came into full fruition in the 2nd century, under the successor Nubian kingdom of Meroë. The script can be read but not understood, with the discovery at el-Hassa, Sudan of ram statues bearing meroitic inscriptions might assist in its translation.

=== The Sahel ===
With the arrival of Islam came the Arabic alphabet in the Sahel. Arabic writing is widespread in the Sahel. The Arabic script was also used to write native African languages. The script used in this capacity is often called Ajami. The languages that have been or are written in Ajami include Hausa, Mandinka, Fulani, Wolofal, Tamazight, Nubian, Yoruba, Songhai, and Kanuri.

=== West Africa ===
N'Ko script developed by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa. It is used in Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and neighboring countries by a number of speakers of Manding languages.
Nsibidi is ideographic set of symbols developed by the Ekoi people of Southeastern coastal Nigeria for communication. A complex implementation of Nsibidi is only known to initiates of Ekpe secret society.
Adinkra is a set of symbols developed by the Akan people (Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire), used to represent concepts and aphorisms.
The Vai syllabary is a syllabic writing system devised for the Vai language by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ in Liberia during the 1830s.
Adamorobe Sign Language is an indigenous sign language developed in the Adamorobe Akan village in Eastern Ghana. The village has a high incident of genetic deafness.
Usman dan Fodio accomplished a great feat in raising the literacy rate of the people of the Sokoto Caliphate in only a few decades. Multiple independent historical surveys have estimated the male literacy rate to have stayed at about 96-97% and the female literacy rate remained between 93%-95% by the death of the Shehu. The female literacy rate of Sokoto in 1812 was higher than women in the United Kingdom and the United States. The British traveler Col. Runciman reported in awe that the people of Sokoto "were literate not to a man, but to a woman".

=== Central Africa ===
Across eastern Angola and northwestern Zambia, sona ideographs were used as mnemonic devices to record knowledge and culture. Gerhard Kubik explains the various aspects of sona that indicate space and time concepts as circular, multidirectional, and multidimensional. For instance, in terms of directionality of drawing, the sona is performed from left to right, from bottom to top (on a wall), or from close to the body to far. This mirrors the process of the line, which in the theory of the Eulerian path returns to the beginning. Furthermore, Kubik describes sona as being synaesthetic, with visuality and aurality paired in the dot and line structure of the drawings. He concludes, remarkably, that "[the evidence of inherent patterns] shows that the African discovery, unparalleled in any other culture in the world, of how to make use of the reactions of the human perceptual apparatus by deliberately creating configurations which must decompose' and reconstitute as 'inherent patterns,' encompasses both the aural and the visual m realm." Thus sona is a well-established mediating system, or apparatus, that coded "deterritorialized flows" through writing, speech, voice, sound instruments, and (masquerade) costumes. Bárbaro Martínez Ruiz writes of a broad practice of this type of writing in Central Africa and the Cuban diaspora, especially through the Bakongo people. He argues that writing includes performance, objects, rhythms, gestures, and even food identifiers. Sona demonstrates that even in so-called unmediated practices, language operates as protocol that negotiates power relationships and intimate acts of colonization. That is, sona is a code, based on a binary code much like computerized information processing, that does something in addition to saying something. Simon Battestini details the various ways that the term writing can be analyzed in Africa, what he distills as all "encoded traces of a text". In other definitions, writing is seized thought, which yet preserves its noetic-poetic and heterogeneous modes of communication."Sona has been compared to computing because of its recursive logic of both visual patterning and its framing of
social dynamics. It resists any medium that has been designed to decouple information from communication, whether the book or the computer".
Lukasa memory boards were also used among the BaLuba.
Talking drums exploit the tonal aspect of many African languages to convey very complicated messages. Talking drums can send messages 25 to 40 kilometres (15 to 25 mi). Bulu, a Bantu language, can be drummed as well as spoken. In a Bulu village, each individual had a unique drum signature. A message could be sent to an individual by drumming his drum signature. It has been noted that a message can be sent 160 kilometres (100 mi) from village to village within two hours or less using a talking drum.

=== East Africa ===
On the Swahili coast, the Swahili language was written in Arabic script, as was the Malagasy language in Madagascar.
The people of Uganda developed a form of writing based on a floral code and the use of talking drums was widespread as well.