Africa writes back
European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong
"But Bourdieu’s observational mistake – the idea that the Kabyle weren’t
literate – is actually not his most consequential misapprehension. That
would be the idea that literacy is a supreme cognitive and cultural
achievement. 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’.
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. But they’re value-neutral only because they annihilate
even the possibility of other values, of other modes of thinking or
being. 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. That supposed absence is
the product of intellectual arrogance, yes, but it’s also part of a
European cultural heritage"
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