Amadou Nadiaye carefully traced the lines on a piece of paper, understanding the world he can no longer see. It has been two hundred years since the invention of Braille, a tactile writing system. It has transformed the lives of many blind and partially sighted people, providing a path to literacy and independence.
“Braille has helped me live my life,” said Nadiaye, a Malian social worker who lost his sight as a child. “Before, people asked themselves: Here is someone who cannot see, how can he succeed? How can he integrate into society?” Mali, a West African country of more than 20 million people, has long struggled to integrate the blind and partially sighted.
According to the eye care charity SightSaver, an estimated 170,000 people in Mali are blind. Nadiaye, 47, was fortunate enough to join the Malian Association for the Blind. There he learned to write in Braille and told himself: “Really, everything that others do, I can do too.” He later attended university.
According to him, Braille has allowed him to develop his main hobby, playing the guitar. Braille also emphasizes the importance of touch. “Every pressure on the strings, every movement of the fingers on the neck, becomes a living note full of meaning,” he said. The guitar is an integral part of the Malian griot tradition, a cultural practice of telling stories through music. Musicians have adapted the guitar to imitate the sound of traditional stringed instruments such as the kora.
Local artists such as Ali Farka Touré have blended Malian melodies with elements of the blues to create a soulful, compelling sound that has received international acclaim. The renowned Malian musical duo Amadou and Mariam awakened Nadia’s passion for the instrument when he was a teenager. “One day, near a photography studio, I heard their music echoing through the window, which inspired me to discover this world,” he said.
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia, known as the ‘blind duo of Mali’, gained international fame in the 1990s with their fusion of traditional Malian music, rock and blues. Bagayoko lost his sight at the age of 16, while Doumbia went blind at the age of five after suffering from untreated measles.
The pair met at a Malian institution for the blind, where Doumbia was studying Braille and teaching dance and music classes. In such settings, Braille has allowed students to overcome educational barriers such as the long learning curve of learning to read and write. According to Ali Mustapha Dikko, who teaches at an institution for the blind in the capital, Bamako, they can then take the same exams as anyone else, which allows them to find jobs.
Dikko is also blind. Using a special typewriter, he can create lessons in Braille for his students. But he says his students are still at a disadvantage. “We have a shortage of teaching materials,” Dikko said. He has one reading book in Braille for an entire class of dozens of students. But with the development of new technology, some blind and partially sighted people hope that educational barriers will continue to fall.
“There is software, there are talking telephones, so there are many things that are spoken,” said Bagayoko of the musical duo, “that allows us to move forward.” But Moussa Mbenge, an inclusive education program officer at Senegal-based SiteSavers, said such advances still do not equal the leaps Braille made two centuries ago. “It cannot replace Braille. On the contrary, for me, technology complements Braille,” he said.
