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he googled N’Ko. “That was the big wow,” he said.
He found a teacher in Queens. “When I listened to
the alphabet, I listened to our history. Now I ca
n read the same words my mother would say to me.”
N’Ko first moved from hand-copied manuscripts into
the digital age two decades ago. In the early 199
0s, Diane, the teacher of N’Ko at Cairo University
, was collating an N’Ko text in a copy shop when h
e was approached by an employee. “Why are you kill
ing yourself?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know
about DOS?” The employee explained to Diane that u
sing computer software, he could write a new scrip
t and generate as many copies as he wished. Togeth
er with information-technology experts at Cairo Un
iversity, Diane developed a rudimentary font to us
e on his own computer. But creating a font that an
yone could use was a much more complicated task.
First, it meant getting N’Ko into Unicode — the in
ternational standard that assigns a unique number
to each character in a given writing system. Then
Microsoft picked up N’Ko for its local language pr
ogram — sort of. N’Ko was included in Windows 7, b
ut the ligatures were misaligned, and the letters
were not linked from below as they should have bee
n. “The original plan was to fully support it, but
we just didn’t have the resources,” said Peter Co
nstable, a senior program manager at Microsoft. Fo
r Windows 8, which is still being tested, Microsof
t has fixed the problem. Most writers of N’Ko down
load the font for use with Open Office’s Graphite
program, developed by SIL International, a Christi
an group with an interest in seeing the Bible reac
h every hut and yurt on the planet.
Digital technology has already transformed how Tra
ore communicates with his family. When his father
died in 1994, his family in Kiniebakoro sent news
of the death to cousins in Ivory Coast by going to
the bus station and looking for a passenger headi
ng toward their city; the cousins then mailed a le