1922-1987
El. Fodé Souleymane Kanté
The founder of the N'ko script
| El. Fodé Souleymane Kanté was born in 1922 in Guinea,
West Africa. His natal village, Soumankoï, is located 15km north of
Kankan in eastern Guinea. Soumankoï is the first Maninka-Mory
village in the Baté area.
El. Fodé Souleymane Kanté created the N'ko alphabet while living in Ivory Coast. He was angered by critics of African culture. In response, he developed the N'ko alphabet to give African people their own means to communuicate and record their history in their native languages. He wrote books in N'ko explaining complex and foreign ideas to Mandé (Maninka) people using their own language. He left to the world a library of nearly 200 books in N'ko on diverse topics ranging from poetry to physics, from astronomy to theology N'ko is an alphabet created in West Africa by the Guinean scholar Souleymane Kanté in 1949. It was designed to accurately transcribe African tonal languages with special attention to tones that cannot be transcribed with the Latin alphabet. It is used mainly by West African speakers of Mande languages, such as Maninka, Bambara, Dioula and their dialects. Over the past fifty years, N'ko has spread throughout West Africa. It is central to a grass roots, native-language literacy movement in the region. Sizable N'ko literate populations can be found in Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, The Gambia, Mali, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. Numerous organizations have been created and hundreds of books have been written to teach and spread N'ko literacy around the world. This site provides information on how to read and write N'ko, while also filling in the historical background of the alphabet's creator. Links to publications and N'ko organization are also included in this site.
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