Ancient Africa had a predominantly, but not exclusively, oral tradition. But Ethiopia for over a 1000 of years has used, and still uses a Ge’ez based native script. And apart from Ajami (Arabic script for African languages), West Africa had Vai and Nsibidi. Not to mention the obvious Nile-Valley (Ancient Egyptian and Nubian) scripts at the beginning of civilization.

Where do Black people originate from? Then if the answer is Africa, then what is the purpose of identifying with a color over our beautiful Motherland? Black is a construction, which articulates a recent social-political reality of people of color (pigmented people). Black is not a racial family, an ethnic group or a super-ethnic group. Political blackness is thus not an identity but moreover a social-political consequence of a world which after colonialism and slavery existed in those color terms.

Words have meanings, but meanings are dictated –like everything else by those with power. Words play a critical role in articulating reality and that means reality is a subset of linguistics, and agency. No word is innocent in the hands of power, yet every word is dangerous when applied to the oppressed. We must treat sociolinguistics as a serious area of