Ngom Publishes Chapters in Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age
Prof. Fallou Ngom, Director of the African Studies Center and Professor of Anthropology, published a chapter in Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, March 2020). Entitled, “Digital Archives for African Studies: Making Africa’s Written Heritage Visible,” the chapter highlights the misunderstandings of literacy in Africa.
An excerpt:
For centuries, many Wastern-trained scholars (including africans) have considered sub-Saharan Africa to be a region witn no written tradition, partly because they are unaware of the long history of writing in the region. Many assume that writing emerged in sub-African as a result of the European colonization in the nineteenth century. In reality, sub-Saharan Africans had been reading and writing in multiple languages and writing systems long before the colonial encounter.
You can read the entire chapter here.
Fallou Ngom is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African Studies Center, an affiliate center at the Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies. His research interests include the interactions between African languages and non-African languages, the Africanization of Islam, and Ajami literatures—records of West African languages written in Arabic script. Read more about him, here.