Designing Endangered Scripts, Part V: Tapiwanashe S Garikayi

In my design process, instead of jumping on to the internet to research, I look around my surroundings getting inspiration from nature and everything I lay my eyes on. There is a lot to admire, from hut patterns, stone sculptures, wild animals, traditional musical instruments etc. Getting inspiration from all this, I breathe life into the designs (especially typefaces) so that Afrikan ideas, innovation and lifestyle are visible. “The script is also included in primers and learning exercise materials for students.

These will require an equally simple but different shaping method which I’m still experimenting on. The ‘rlig’ (Required Ligatures) OpenType feature replaces a sequence of glyphs with a single glyph. The feature is widely supported and it is usually automatically enabled in most text editing & publishing applications, making it suitable for the intended usage. In our case, it will be replacing the sequence of glyphs ‘S & i’ base character sa + vowel i with a single glyph ‘_si’ syllable si. Further demonstrating, to type my name ‘Tapiwa’, you would tap ‘T’ on the keyboard to display the syllable ‘Ta’, tap ‘P i’ to display syllable ‘pi’ and ‘W’ to get the syllable ‘wa’…et voila!

Shop Endangered Alphabets Merchandise

The first person to learn the script was Mwandipa Chimaliro;1 ten other students that year learned the script as well who went on to teach others.1 In 2007 the Mwangwego Club was formed whose membership is open to those that have learned the script. The structure of the Mwangwego script helped establish the method I used to create a functional font. The script is an abugida, vowels are added to the base characters (consonants) which have an inherent vowel ‘a’ to form syllables. Spacing consonant modifiers & diacritics are also used to extend the consonants. This is how far I’ve managed to go, the base consonants & syllables can be accurately displayed while utilizing the Latin character code-points however, there are still more consonant onsets formed by adding non-spacing modifiers and diacritics.

Published

Mwangwego script, is one of the writing systems not yet encoded into the Unicode standard, meaning it can’t be displayed on computers, smartphones & the World Wide Web, as shown above. The purpose of MwangWego.com this font is to enable people, mainly educators, designers, and linguists, to create teaching, documentation & awareness material to keep the writing system alive in the digital age. These will also be helpful submissions to accelerate the Unicode encoding process, functionality then is important considering the target group mentioned earlier.

In 1977, on a trip to Paris, France, he realised how various non-Latin writing systems were used around the world. Reflecting on his knowledge that the languages of Malawi, particularly, Chichewa and Kyandonde, have words that mean “to write”, he postulated that the languages of Malawi could have had writing systems of their own languages. Summarized, everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on phones and computers. The Unicode Consortium helps make that possible by standardizing the world’s writing systems…and emoji.

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.

Our mission is to play an active role in preserving endangered cultures by using their writing systems to create artwork and educational materials. The story behind the creation of the script, the why, is also something I believe & resonate with; the Latin alphabet used to write Bantu languages does not accurately represent the unique qualities of our languages. A melange of all this is the driving factor of my interest in the script. As a designer, I strive to develop work that speaks to both me and others about the beauty (runako) that exists in Afrikan societies.