Souleymane Kante was born in 1922 in Soumankoyin- Kolonin, about eight miles from Kankan, where his Maninka father ran a Koranic school. A gifted student, he studied at his father’s school and in the evening it is said he would help others study and correct their mistakes. His father died in 1941, and his Koranic school, which at the time had more than 300 students, gradually declined after that, built as it was on its founder’s reputation. Kante decided to leave home and travel to Cote D’Ivoire, to see the world and seek his fortune. He settled for a while in Bouake, in northern Cote D’Ivoire. It was here in the markets of Bouake that Kante came across a pamphlet by a Lebanese journalist, Lamal Marwa, titled Nahnu fi Afrikiya (We Are In Africa), in which Marwa is reported to have asserted that Africans were inferior because they had no written form of communication. African languages, Marwa is said to have claimed in this pamphlet, were like the songs of birds and impossible to transcribe. Kante was shocked and insulted to read this and in response, over the course of many years, he developed the alphabet that came to be known as N’ko.
The origins of N’ko were first documented by Diane Oyler, in the 90s, based largely off of interviews from people who knew Kante. First Kante tried to figure out how to use Arabic to write his Maninka language and later tried the Roman alphabet. During this time he moved to Bingerville, then the capital of Cote D’Ivoire, where he sold Arabic books. He eventually concluded that Arabic and Roman alphabets were inadequate for use in writing Maninka. Sentences like “The old women have come” and “The brothers of the women have come” appeared identical when written in Roman or Arabic scripts — “muso kodo lu bada na” – yet they were easily distinguished when spoken, due to differences in the tone in the word kodo. For that reason, he decided to take his own approach. He selected an alphabet with 27 letters and devised a system 36 of marks for differentiating vowel tone.
N’ko is usually described as having seven vowels:
And twenty consonants:
Next, it is said that he gathered together a collection of children and adults and asked them to draw a line in the dirt. Seven of ten drew the line from right to left and for that reason he chose the right-to-left orientation for writing and reading N’ko. This new alphabet, Kante claimed, could be used to write all sounds used in Mande languages – Mandingo, Bambara, Djula and more. He is reported to have finished this project on April 14th, 1949. The immediate impetus for Kante’s N’ko creation was Marwa’s pamphlet, but more generally, it is said that Kante sought a way to spread knowledge more easily. His father had gained renown for educational innovations that made learning the Koran faster; Kante was steeped in this tradition of Koranic learning and literacy. He selected a lighted lantern as the symbol of N’ko, suggesting N’ko would help lead people out of the darkness of illiteracy and ignorance. Foreign languages like French were an imperfect solution, imbued as they were with the words and thought patterns of foreign cultures. N’ko, Kante hoped, would serve as a truly indigenous alphabet for Mande people to record, preserve, and share their own culture and history.
Writing and translating in N’ko became his life- long occupation. He used N’ko to write about the history of Bamako, the Kaba family in Kankan, Sierra Leone, and more. His first translation project was the Koran and associated Hadiths. He also translated works into N’ko from a variety of fields, including geography, meteorology, mathematics, zoology. Documenting the traditional knowledge of the medicinal usages of plants became a particular interest for Kante. He is remembered as encouraging friends and family to talk to their older relatives and to use N’ko to write down their stories and knowledge. When the new alphabet was first completed, Kante did not publicize it widely, aware of the potentially subversive nature of the alphabet: a threat to the prestige of the French-speaking educated class and to the authority of Islamic leaders.
At first, he only taught N’ko to friends and family. But like many Guineans, he returned home after Guinea declared independence from France, settling in Kankan. In the wake of the sudden and dramatic end to colonial rule, Kante appealed directly to Guinea’s new leader, Seku Toure, advocating for N’ko to become the national alphabet of the new country. Kante’s vision for N’ko seemed like it would have aligned with Toure’s nationalism and anti-colonialism. Reportedly, Toure praised N’ko but said it would not promote communication among Guinea’s various ethnic groups, nor would it help Guinea communicate with the outside world. Instead, Toure implemented the National Language Program, which mandated local language use in schools, written with the French alphabet. The National Language Program suffered from the same drawbacks that Toure claimed that N’ko had and it never became well established. The program was disbanded upon Toure’s death in 1984.
Living in Kankan in the late 50’s, Kante was undeterred by Toure’s rejection and he and two of his brothers opened a shop at the market; his brothers ran the shop while Kante taught N’ko. The alphabet was controversial at first – in the late 50’s the city was caught up in the conflict between traditional Tijani Islamic leaders and those who advocated for the more modern Wahhabism. In this charged atmosphere, everything became fraught, with leaders taking sides over N’ko, just like they were with everything else. But this didn’t stifle the new alphabet’s spread. Kante had an informal, grassroots approach to promoting N’ko – sharing it with and teaching it to friends, family members, acquaintances. This became the model for how N’ko spread – via informal channels, at the market, in people’s homes, by word of mouth. Kante kept teaching and gradually his students began teaching others. N’ko schools were soon established throughout the region immediately around Kankan. Students in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, where Kante lived for a time, continued teaching N’ko after his departure. There were early reports of N’ko students in Sierra Leone and Liberia as well.
Yet N’ko never gained formal support from government institutions. Dissemination of printed N’ko texts remained a persistent problem. Kante hand-wrote many of the texts and made handwritten copies for further dissemination. An N’ko font for electronic word processing was later developed, but dissemination remained challenging. Even today, the true extent of N’ko’s spread is difficult to discern. Some websites are devoted to N’ko, a handful of Western academics study it. N’ko is world-wide, but it remains a local phenomenon, decentralized, everywhere, yet no where at the same time.