Designing a font for the Mwangwego script

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.

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!

More than 2,000 people have been taught the script, he said, some of whom are now acting as teachers in their turn. Our next writing system takes us to Southern Africa, particularly in a landlocked country called Malawi. Home to several Bantu languages, like Chichewa, Malawian Lomwe and Lambya, Malawi sure boasts a variety of languages in the Bantu language group. What interested me the most is the fact that it was the first Afrikan writing system I understood very well in regards to writing ChiShona.

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 If a script exists only in historical documents, engravings, and inscriptions, it is all too easy to assume it is no longer in use, and the culture that created it has also been lost.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.

But at almost 26 years since its creation, what sort of progress has this writing system made? While it recorded around 400 learners at the start of the 2010s, with goals to teach it to thousands, precise numbers since this statistic have yet to materialise. Only one book has ever been published entirely written in Mwangwego, and the writing system has not yet been recognised by the ISO standard as of 2018.

Mwangwego script

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 Mwangwego script 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 came in the form of additional diacritics placed before the syllable character, which can range from a horizontal line to represent labialisation, to two dots indication aspiration. This month’s designer is Tapiwanashe S. Garikayi, who is based in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. He designs fonts for indigenous African scripts, using African motifs and colors from outside the realm of conventional type. In particular he has been working with the Mwangwego script, created for Malawian languages such as Chichewa and Kyandonde by Nolence Mwangwego, just across the border in Malawi. Born in 1951 in Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, Mwangwego visited Paris in 1977, where he discovered the existence of other, non-Latin writing systems.

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.

Published

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.

Chichewa syllables, like many other Bantu languages, and languages spoken in Malawi, have several modifications to consonant sounds. They can be plain, with no modifications, at all, labialised (followed by a -w sound), or palatalised (followed by a -y sound). Additionally, consonants can also be pre-nasalised, such as the syllable ndi., All of these sound modifications are not represented in the alphasyllabary, and so several additions have to be made to make sure Mwangwego represented all of these sounds.

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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.