Designing Endangered Scripts, Part V: Tapiwanashe S Garikayi

As a designer, the letterforms are also interesting as I see some subtle abstract representations of nature in some letterforms. If a script exists only in historical documents, engravings, and inscriptions, it is all too easy MwangWego.com to assume it is no longer in use, and the culture that created it has also been lost. He started his act of creation in 1979; after innumerable modifications and revisions, he considered the script finished and ready for unveiling twenty-four years later, in 2003. Mwangwego was not without qualifications as a linguist, speaking and writing Chewa, Tumbuka, Kyangonde, English, French and Portuguese.

Just a few years ago I picked a particular interest in typeface design and while researching the field, I encountered Afrikan Alphabets a seminal work on indigenous writing systems by Saki Mafundikwa. While looking through Afrikan writing systems, my attention was drawn to the Mwangwego script, a script from Malawi. Welcome to the fourth monthly Endangered Alphabets feature about calligraphy and type design–in indigenous and minority writing systems. While Mwangwego faces an uphill battle to achieve widespread adoption in Malawi, it does not stand alone in an isolated case study. Throughout the continent, various movements and projects have been started by people to represent their own people and language. Perhaps the main challenges now is to encourage widespread adoption, education, and cementing such writing systems as part of their respective cultural identities.

Designing Endangered Scripts, Part V: Tapiwanashe S. Garikayi

Others are clearly the work of a single imagination, a single advocate. Such a script is Mwangwego, the product of a lifetime’s labour by Nolence Moses Mwangwego of Malawi. Some scripts are like the pebbles in a stream, worn into their shapes over centuries by the collective action of millions of users.

General Script, Language, and Culture Resources

In fact, searching up references on many of these writing system websites have returned a result that the domain for Mwangwego’s main website was now on sale. While the creator is still active on Twitter, he does seem to still be resolved in promoting his writing system into Malawian schools. The project for the Mwangwego alphabet started soon after, in 1979, and the first edition was finalised on 7 April 1997. Modifications, simplifications, and further refinements were made during this period, most likely to make it easier to teach, learn, or perhaps reading and writing, or discerning between similar-looking characters.

He theorised that, as there were words meaning ‘write’ in Malawian languages, there might have been indigenous, pre-colonial scripts. The end product was a writing system presenting as an alphasyllabary, written left to right, with vowel marks attached to the bottom right of each base character. With 32 possible consonant blocks with its inherent vowel, this makes a total of 160 possible syllable glyphs. However, looking closer at Chichewa, we see a problem with this set of glyphs.