If Hannibal had succeeded, Punic rather than Latin might have been the language of European intellectuals until the post-Enlightenment. It failed only because the great Carthaginian general Hannibal didn’t destroy Rome itself when he invaded Italy. At one point, Carthage was poised to become the greatest empire on Earth. Indeed, the destruction of that ancient city by lake Tunis could lay claim to being the very lack at the centre of European intellectual culture. But that supposed lack is something that Europe has counted on since the destruction of Carthage. There’s a depressing familiarity to the assumption made by Europeans that Africa is a site of lack. That supposed absence is the product of intellectual arrogance, yes, but it’s also part of a European cultural heritage. When Bourdieu went from the elite École Normale Supérieure to a Kabyle settlement, he saw, ultimately, the absence of what made the university, and his own mind, what it was. But they’re value-neutral only because they annihilate even the possibility of other values, of other modes of thinking or being. For those of us brought up within that system – even brought up, as I was, in a former colony (Kenya) – those standards might appear to be value-neutral. It’s one of the means by which universities shore up the value of their intellectual work – they police grammar, philology, literacy – in short, they define and champion rigour and ‘standards’. That would be the idea that literacy is a supreme cognitive and cultural achievement. For Bourdieu, for example, the very ability to think, to reflect about what’s right, is tied to literacy.īut Bourdieu’s observational mistake – the idea that the Kabyle weren’t literate – is actually not his most consequential misapprehension. The passion – the need – to do what’s right is all too often steered by the conviction that, precisely because we’re intellectuals, we know what’s right. Bourdieu’s is a cautionary tale for intellectuals who are committed to social activism. He insisted that the Kabyle people, whom he lived among and studied for years, were pre-literate, although they used (and still do) the characters of Libyco-Berber. Even as sensitive a philosopher as the French sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who had deep personal ties to Algeria, and who supported the Berber/Amazigh cultural movement, could essentially make the same assumption. There are numerous stories of badly educated, arrogant Europeans insisting that Africans not only never did, but never could, write books. It’s not currently on display.īut Libyco-Berber also reveals a more insidious kind of destruction, an epistemological violence inflicted by even the best-intentioned Europeans. The most important piece of Libyco-Berber writing was pillaged and sold to the British Museum for five pounds. Like Scipio Africanus weeping while he gazed at the Carthage he’d just obliterated, the destruction of the other is turned into life lessons for the destroyer, or artefacts in colonial cabinets of curiosities. It’s something that’s characteristic of modern European civilisation: it both destroys and treasures what it encounters in the rest of the world. There are no long texts surviving that would help, and the legacy of the written language has been one of acts of destruction, both massive and petty. But even after 400 years, it hasn’t been fully deciphered. Libyco-Berber has been recognised as an African script since the 17th century. Everything else written in Libyco-Berber has disappeared. Yet only short passages of it survive, all of them painted or engraved on rock. Found throughout North Africa, and as far west as the Canary Islands, the script might have been used for at least as long as 1,000 years. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |