The African Origins of Writing: A Transdisciplinary Exploration

Résumé

This study investigates the African origins of writing through a transdisciplinary framework combining archaeological field evidence, anthropological analysis, comparative linguistics, cognitive psychology, and ethnographic oral history. Using a mixed-source methodology, the paper triangulates symbolic motifs from Kongo cave engravings, proto-pictographic mnemonic boards, West-African ideographic systems (e.g. Nsibidi, Vai), and North-Eastern African inscriptional corpora, while comparing their structural features to Egyptian hieroglyphic and early consonantal systems. Cross-domain cognitive modelling reveals consistent geometric encoding principles, algorithmic symmetry, and dynamic compositional logic across these African scripts — distinct from and temporally independent of later Eurasian derivatives.

Key findings demonstrate that African writing cannot be reduced to an “oral-only” civilization, but forms an autochthonous epistemic domain characterised by recursive geometry, symbolic abstraction, and high-order information compression. This reframes writing not as a post-Pharaonic imitation, but as a foundational African contribution to human cognitive and technological evolution.

The study proposes future research in: (a) computational reconstruction of extinct African proto-scripts using geometric modelling, (b) neurolinguistic testing of perceptual processing of African fractal glyphs, and (c) curriculum integration of African symbolic logic for STEM pedagogy.

We argue that correcting the historical misattribution of writing origins is not merely historiographical: it is a necessary intervention to reverse internalised inferiority, restore epistemic continuity, and generate new scientific horizons rooted in African cognitive capital.