Books

Along The Mabole

Along the Mabole chronicles the two years the author spent as a Peace Corps Volunteer living in Sierra Leone, weaving together essays and zine-like collections of words and sketches, exploring a range of topics including cooking rice, peanut farming, bicycles, school, voting, all while traveling through Sierra Leone’s beautiful landscapes.

N’ko Alphabet

You can read more about N’ko here.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, I probably wouldn’t have really picked up much Mandingo at all if I hadn’t learned N’ko, a writing system used for Mandingo. For me, N’ko made the Mandingo language more concrete, somehow, and I came to understand how to break the language down – filled with so many short words spoken so quickly – and then build it back up into words, sentences, and finally, halting conversations in Mandingo. I met someone who knew N’ko, a man who lived in Karina, Tejan Kallon, the principal of the local school. The students called him Mr. T. He was one of those people who know five languages and he had this beautiful neat handwriting and he always spoke so carefully, whether in English or Krio or Mandingo or Fula or French or Themne. He learned N’ko in Guinea, and showed me his detailed notebooks filled with neat lines of N’ko letters. Below is my own book that I made about N’ko:

N’ko Alphabet: