NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

tter to Traore in New York. It took two months. No
w communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Trao
re sends an e-mail in N’Ko. His nephew, who works
in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his e-mail a
t the town’s Internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter
and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry
people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He
asks someone on the boat to take the letter to Tra
ore’s family’s house.
For Traore and others, the most pressing reason fo
r making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that
only a small percentage of Guineans can read and w
rite. The United Nations puts the rate of adult li
teracy at 39 percent, but that figure counts mostl
y those who live in major cities — in rural areas,
it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is of
ten conducted in the open air, with no chairs, per
haps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discou
raging to students, it takes place in French, a la
nguage they don’t speak at home.
“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko lite
racy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N
’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fello
w N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of inform
al schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden
languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time,
N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in a
n official school — the pilot program will be in K
iniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.
People had been working on breathing life into N’K
o for years, but they found out about one another
only when they began to put up N’Ko Web sites. The
re is Traore’s site, kouroussaba.com, Diane’s kanj
amadi.com and fakoli.net, the project of Mamady Do
umbouya, a Guinean who worked as a software engine
er in Philadelphia and is devoting his retirement
to N’Ko. He also runs a small organization called
the N’Ko Institute of America. Diane’s students in
Cairo are subtitling DVDs for West Africa in N’Ko