Simon Battestini - African Writing And Text

Battestini, Simon

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African Writing and Text

Translated by

Henri G. J. Evans

1. M. Danesi, Interpreting Advertisements. A Semiotic Guide

2. M. Angenot, Critique of Semiotic Reason

3. S. Feigenbaum, The Intermediate Sign in the System of French and Hebrew Verbs

4. A. Bailin, Metaphor and the Logic of Language Use

5. C.D.E. Tolton, ed.. The Cinema of Jean Cocteau

6. C. Madott Kosnik, Primary Education: Goals, Processes and Practices

7. F. Nuessel, The Esperanto Language

8. M.G. Guido, The Acting Reader

9. F. Ratto, Hobbes tra scienza della politica e teoria delle passioni

10. S. Battestini, African Writing and Text

Cover: A Nsibidi text.

From Talbot, P.A. 1912. In the Shadow of the Bush. London: Heinemann. Story (8), Appendix G, p. 459.

Simon Battestini

Translated

by

Henri G. J. Evans

2000 LEGAS No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

Main entry under title:

Simon Battestini

African Writing and Text

(Language, Media & Education Studies; 10) Translation of: Ecriture et texte.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-894508-06-8

1. Writing communicationAfrica. 2. WritingAfrica.

3. Africa-Civilization. 4. SemioticsAfrica. 5. African literature Social aspects. 6. Discourse analysisAfrica.

I. Evans, Henri G.J. II. Title. III. Series.

P211.3.A3B3713 2000 302.2'244'096 C00-901104-8

For further information and for orders:

P. O. Box 040328 68 Kamloops Ave.

Brooklyn, New York Ottawa, Ontario

2908 Dufferin Street Toronto, Ontario M6B 3S8

USA 11204

K1V 7C9

Printed and bound in Canada

et

pour Frangoise-Melitta

Foreword.9

Preface.13

1. Visible Speech, Seized Thought.19

Defining Concepts: Writing and Thought and/or Speech.28

2. Africa and Writing: Introducing a Continent of Writing

Systems and Texts as a Critique of Current Writing Studies.61

3. History: About the Relationship of History

and Writing Studies.102

4 . Society: Of the Life of Signs within African Societies .160

5. Art: Art as Text and Art Context.209

6. Paroles: From Spoken Words to Thought-Writing.267

7. Knowledge: Of the Necessity to Evaluate Knowledge

Through its Perceivable Symptoms .311

8. Text: From Written Text to Culture. 342

9. Literature: Effects of African Writing and Text

on Other Cultures . 383

Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Writing and Text.412

Bibliography..421

Index.464

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/africanwritingteOOOObatt

The real purpose of forewords seems to lie in enunciating the rules of a new game, starting from facts and their old articulations, but tilting at their usual meanings and announcing new articulations, thus generating new meanings. Let it be said at the outset, that the present project seeks to widen the notions of writing and text, and rearrange their relationships. The underlying data and reflections are the fruits of nearly four decades of sporadic research of them in Africa.

In retrospect, we have a feeling that this program has matured more or less by itself all along those vagrant years and without much conscious willing on our part. Its intermittent growth may, with hindsight, be articulated into three moments. Having collected, between 1951 and 1993, and at first out of sheer curiosity, documents on writing in Africa and elsewhere, our first approach had been perforce encyclopedic. We were preparing a dictionary of African writing systems, from which our attention was only momentarily diverted by the drafting of the present text. As we surveyed the documents that amounted to an ordered descriptive inventory, the need for an analysis of the whole impressed itself upon us. At the base of the West's refusal to see writing and text in the African symbolic and literary landscape, could there not lurk an interesting motivation? Could not the means by which writing was eliminated from Africanist discourse help to explain the turn taken early on by the Africa-West relationship? We were sailing into new waters, an ensemble of concrete data that might conceivably lead to a critical renewal of Africanist discourse1 and, beyond it, of the ways sciences constitute themselves and of their responsibilities. Out of the ordering of these data emerged the need to question the concept of writing and then of text, a need grown out of Africa but ultimately weaned from her. This book as a whole begs to stand as prolegomena to writing, the begetter of text.

Our study addresses linguists, semioticians, communication specialists, experts, students and teachers of writing, African art critics, as well as Africanist scholars and observers of Africa. Nevertheless, the