Sirada — An ka taa

Banner for “Sirada: Street-side Texts of Manding in West Africa” exhibit

Sirada is a virtual exhibit of photos and texts exploring Manding (e.g., Bambara, Jula and Maninka) as written with the Latin script in the streets of West Africa.

Moto-taxi with a mudflap featuring a lion and some words in Manding

What is the role and nature of Manding written amongst the French that dominates the street-side texts found on vehicles, in advertisements and on signs in West Africa?

Millions of people across much of Mali, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire speak Manding under local names such as Bambara, Jula or Maninka. However, the language is by and large absent from official francophone schooling. Speakers and outsiders alike often claim therefore that the language is not written. This is wrong.

Store with an advertisement for “Bara Musso”, a spice company, painted above it

West Africans educated in Quranic schools sometimes wrote Manding using the Arabic script—a practice that is often called Ajami. This continues today albeit often in personal notes, medicinal treatment recipes and other texts that are not made for wide-spread sharing.

Road sign in Côte d’Ivoire indicating a town’s name in Arabic and Latin characters

Despite—or, perhaps, as a result of—not being part of official state education efforts, the majority of written Manding now is produced in N’ko (ߒߞߏ), a writing system invented by a West African intellectual, Sulemaana Kantè, in 1949. People across Manding-speaking West Africa and its diaspora use it to publish hundreds of print and digital texts a year—not to mention innumerable messages via personal and group chats.

A man browsing N’ko books for sale street-side in Kankan, Guinea.

Between Ajami and N'ko, there is Manding written with the Latin script. This tradition began under the linguists, administrators and missionaries behind Western colonial enterprises during the nineteenth century. West African governments—with funding from UNESCO and advice from Western scholars—made it official during the region's initial decade of independence in the 1960s. Later in the 1980s, institutions such as Burkina Faso's National Literacy Institute and Mali's National Directorate of Functional Literacy and Applied Linguistics incorporated additional letters derived from the work of linguists into Manding spelling: ɛ, ɲ, ŋ and ɔ.

Entrance sign to the National Literacy Institute in Ouagadougou with Latin extended alphabet on it

The vast majority of the millions of people that speak Manding do not formally learn to read or write the language using the official Latin-based orthographies. Public schooling is in French.

In the streets, however, one still encounters Manding written in Latin script. Blazoned across taxis, tucked into advertisements or discretely part of shop names, Manding speakers draw on various systems to produce ad hoc spellings but clear messages.

SOTRAMA shared mini-bus with Manding written on the back

This exhibit’s photos (and accompanying captions that include a standard spelling interpretation and an English translation) reveal the themes, words and locations of sirada (street-side) Manding in Latin script as written or encountered by West Africans.