 Abadi Yaakov. I am an African. I think that's pretty clear. As a kid growing up in Zimbabwe I was highly intrigued and fascinated by the letter forms I saw in books and magazines and I spent a lot of time sketching them. It's only when I went to the US to study that I discovered graphic design. Besides running the design school in Harare I wrote the book on African typography. It's called African Alphabets. It's available on amazon.com in Nigeria and South Africa. I'm working on bringing it to Kenya and the rest of the continent where it belongs. And mind you I use the word alphabets loosely here. They're more like writing systems. We'll take a look at the spectrograph from the Jokwa people of Angola. It is the story of creation and it's called Kotanga. At the top is God. At the bottom is humanity. And on the left is the Sun. And on the right is the moon. All the parts lead to God. And CBD is an ancient writing system that was devised by the Ejakam people, the Afik people from southwestern Nigeria. And it is a writing of a secret society, a sort of a special interest group. But there are some symbols and signs that we are pretty to know and to see. The rest of them are secret only for initiates and practitioners. The Akhan people of Ghana who also filter into Cote d'Ivoire created adinkra symbols about 400 years ago. And these mainly are proverbs and symbols from everyday life that carry wisdom. My favorite one is Sankofa, the first one at the top. Return to the past. Go and get it. Go and reclaim your past. And that's what I'm doing with these African alphabets. In South Africa, they have Bantu symbol writing, and it is practiced mainly by women who paint it on their homes and also weave them into proverbs that make beaded bracelets. Ethiopic of Ethiopia is a writing used to write Amharic, which is the main language, the national language, and spoken by over 14 million people. It is also the oldest, one of the oldest writing systems in the world. This man here, I call him a Renaissance man, King Ibrahim Joya, of the Bamum Kingdom from Cameroon invented a writing system called Shumum at the age of 25 in 1896. The writing went through six stages of development in over 30 years. And what you see here at the top, from the top to the bottom, are three stages. And as you can see, there was an effort at each stage to make it more proficient and efficient. The last one is the current Shumum writing. The white people of Liberia created a syllabary in the 1800s. And a syllabary, basically like my name Saki, that's two syllables. So each symbol doesn't stand for a word, but it stands for a syllable. The men, the people of Sierra Leone also created a syllabary, the men, the syllabary. And unlike the vi, it reads from right to left. Africa abounds with beauty. And as Sankofa says, we have to go back there and get our cues from this beauty that surrounds us in the work that we do to inspire us. There are certain groups, you call them tribes, that paint their bodies. Now this is the form of writing because the people in the group understand what the painting means and is for a specific ritual or ceremony. This image is from Zimbabwe. This is a stone sculpture of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has become well famous for it. And I love this shot because these characters remind me of characters from Star Wars, just showing how connected we all are. My students at the top and at the bottom, a workshop I ran in Turin in Italy with a group of international students. And these are the forms that my students design. The object of this is for students to really appreciate the complexity and intricacies of letter forms so that they have respect for typography. And this is the work done with my students in Turin at the workshop, all inspired by African alphabets. African alphabets debunk the myth of the dark continent. They lay to rest the lies born out of ignorance that have been leveled at our beautiful Mama Africa, as Santesana.