Name Solomana Kante Role Inventor | Died 1987, Conakry, Guinea | |
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La vie de salati solomana kante l inventeur de l alphabet n ko
Souleymane Kante or Solomana Kante (1922-November 23, 1987) was a Guinean writer and inventor of the N'Ko alphabet for the Manding languages of Africa. N'Ko means 'I say' in all Manding languages.
Kante created N'Ko in 1949 after a night of deep meditation, in response to what he felt were beliefs that Africans were a "cultureless people", and since there was, prior to this time, no indigenous African writing system for his language. N'ko came first into use in Kankan, Guinea as a Maninka alphabet and was disseminated from there into other Manding-speaking parts of West Africa.
New findings by Haitian researcher Rodney Salnave, based on the 1791 writing of Tamerlan, a literate slave in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), as shown that Souleymane Kante was not the inventor of the N'Ko alphabet in 1949. N'Ko was in fact invented 2 centuries earlier, in the early part of the 1700s, by future Segou Empire King Ngolo Diarra (1718-1790) who studied in Timbuktu, Mali, in his youth. Although born in Guinea, Souleymane Kante's family came from Segou in Mali where N'Ko was in use. And Souleymane Kante who revived the N'Ko writing, must have had that alphabet in his family's possession for generations.