why didn't continental africa develop a written languge of its own?

Question

most every other culture seems to have managed it, especially over such a massive area. There are so many benefits to having a written language...it's almost inconceivable not to.

Answer 1

Leaving aside Egypt (as mentioned in a previous answer) and it's satellite states and leaving out the states bordering the Persian Gulf which had access to Arabic culture and concentrating on sub-saharan Africa.

I heartily recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" which has suggested reasons for this and other, similar, questions.

Basically, in order to be in a position to develop a written language, you have to be farmers with a surplus of produce over your needs, so that you can support a community of priests, soldiers, scribes etc. So that excludes all the hunter-gatherer communities. If you have to spend every waking hour looking for food, there's no time for anything else and no need for anything else. Writing always seems to arise as a method of counting and recording goods and produce to avoid disputes as to payment/taxes etc.

You can't have farmers unless you have access to suitable crops and domesticatable animals which sub-saharan Africa laregely doesn't have.

Secondly, you almost always have to have seen someone else's writing to get the very idea of writing things down. Very few cultures actually come up with the idea on their own.

This is a gross over-simplification of the book which is a very interesting, non-jargony read.

Having said all that, do we know for sure that cultures like the city of Zimbabwe (the original culture) didn't have a written language which has just been wiped out by invaders and colonists.

Answer 2

I take you are forgetting of course, the Egyptian hieroglyphs - one of the most sophisticated pictogram systems ever devised.
Then there is of course, the Ethiopian written script, which is still in use.
As for southern and central Africa, they didn't utilise writing until the Arab and then European colonists and Slavers arrived.

Answer 3

I also wonder why primitive people haven't discovered electricty or other things.
I figure because of the heat and because of the lack of communmication with other peoples.