Ajami in the Sahel: Literacy Programs in Burkina Faso

By Nora Updegrove MIA ’18

Outside the small office, dusk was falling, and the hot air of the Sahel still lingered. Inside, four women — two Burkinabe, two American — sat on mats on the floor, exhausted but content after a long day. Strewn around them were half-eaten bowls of tô, made from millet and corn, bottles of gingembre juice, and notes scrawled in something between French and English. Through a window, a far-off call to prayer trickled in.

Last summer, I was one of these women, and I was far from home, and far from SIPA. Beside me were two colleagues, one local and one American. Across from us sat Hawa, imposing yet affable, dressed in colorful pagne and a smile that rarely left her face. Hawa was the reason we had come here, to just outside Kaya, a small city that is nonetheless one of Burkina Faso’s largest. The day before, we had crept northward from the capital of Ouagadougou, inching closer to the volatile Sahel region and traveling in my first-ever armored car. We were there on a mission — to meet with imams and marabouts, and to visit five Koranic schools, two among the city’s dusty streets and three in distant villages. For Hawa, it was just another workday, a chance to check in on the workings of IQRA, the nonprofit she had built on her experience as a leader in the Muslim community and a former teacher. As for me, I was there to observe her program, one centered around literacy programs in Koranic schools. I was there to listen.

So that’s what I did. I listened.

I sat at a table in a partially constructed hotel, surrounded by marabouts, Koranic schoolteachers, who told us of the growing jihadist threat they faced to the north. In Burkina Faso’s Sahel region, violent extremism fueled by instability in Mali is creeping southward over the border, and these teachers had traveled to Kaya to speak to us about the realities they faced back home.

I listened as they spoke of their curricula, which until recently had included neither literacy nor numeracy. This is the case in most Koranic schools across the country, where education is centered around the memorization of the Koran, and a student can ascend to the highest level without ever learning to read or write. However, these schools have been pillars of their communities, often for centuries, sometimes passed down from father to son. Today, the marabouts explained, their curricula have been expanded. Their students were writing, courtesy of Ajami, a script that adapts Arabic characters to be used for local languages. This is an especially potent tool in a country where much of the population does not speak the predominant written (and colonial) language, French. Thanks to IQRA, which provides these schools with literacy and civic engagement programs, Koranic schools are able to apply their long familiarity with Arabic script to their own languages. Burkina Faso is one of the world’s poorest countries, and its total adult literacy rate is less than 30 percent. In just two years, IQRA’s Ajami program had allowed these students — and their marabouts themselves — to beat the odds. Literacy, the marabouts proudly explained, gives their students not only the skills to succeed in the workforce, but to truly understand the messages of the Koran, and not to be misled by extremists.

We left the hotel, climbed into our armored car, and set out on red dust roads, thudding into potholes and crossing flooded ravines as bemused goats looked on. In each village, we were ushered into a small clay building, or sometimes onto mats outside. I listened to the students who gathered, laughing, bathed in electric lights IQRA had provided. They read aloud letters that they had composed and excerpts from the Koran in their own languages, Moore and Fulfunde. One marabout looked on proudly as his students finished their recitations and then handed us a book covered in Ajami characters. In the more than 100 years his village’s school had operated, he explained, what we held in our hands was the first ever record of its students.

Under a dusky sky, I listened as young girls, clustered around a blackboard propped up on dry earth, solved math problems. Their teacher, leaning in a doorway, grinned at their success and explained that the skills they gained, they were in turn teaching their mothers. That evening, back in Kaya, I found myself at another school, this one entirely composed of young boys. They had been sent to live far from their villages, their parents motivated by the school’s historical prestige. I watched them scrawl sentences, pieces of chalk clutched in small hands. When the lesson drew to a close, they spilled out onto the streets to beg, red tomato cans bouncing on strings around their necks. I watched them go with a knot in my stomach, and I thought about how the issue of education is never simple, particularly when religion or money is involved.

Today, only a few months have passed since I left Burkina. In that time, two large terrorist attacks have rocked Ouaga, the city I briefly called home. In the Sahel region, where IQRA operates, religious terrorists have forced more than 98 secular schools to close, and the Red Cross reports that at least 15,000 people have fled their homes — a number it believes to be drastically underestimated. As I read these reports, and talk to my friends in Burkina, I think of IQRA and of the communities I visited. I think of these schools, operating in places that the government either does not have the capacity, or no longer dares, to go. And I think especially often of Hawa. In the months I had the privilege to know her, she refused to be deterred, unceasing in her belief that every student matters. Most of all, I think of these students, sitting before a blackboard, reading a story out loud, in their own language, and smiling.

ABOUT THE RAPHAEL SMITH MEMORIAL PRIZE

The Raphael Smith Memorial Prize is given in memory of Raphael Smith, a member of the Class of 1994 who died in a motorcycle accident while retracing his stepfather’s adventure of motorcycling from Paris to Tokyo. The prize, established by his family and friends, is awarded annually to two second-year SIPA students for travel articles that exemplify the adventurism and spirit of SIPA. During this extraordinary year, the scope of the essays was expanded to examine the notion of travel during a global pandemic.

This story appears in SIPA News, published in October 2018.