The "Tukey-Rule."

The question arose as to why most African states lost their indigenous writing scripts. More specifically, why did the Efik, Ibibios and Igbos lose their ancient Nsibidi writing script? To answer this question, one must first understand what I call the "Tukey-rule."

In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, an unmarked chopper landed at the staff quarters of the Princeton University Campus in New Jersey.  No sooner had the chopper landed  than Prof. John Tukey was hurriedly ushered into the unmarked chopper, and transported safely into an undisclosed location. Who was John Tukey and why was he rescued when the United States civilization was apparently on the verge of being destroyed by Soviet nuclear bombs.

John W. Tukey was a great American mathematician best known for development of the Cooley-Tukey algorithm, and was credited for coining the word "software." He was purposefully rescued by the government for his superior computational power. In other words, Tukey was a rare genius and had to live. The unwritten rule, which I call the "Tukey-rule," is when your civilization is on the verge of being destroyed by foreign enemies, the only civilians you rescue are the selected few with superior computational power. The rationale behind this unwritten rule is that certain individuals have the intellectual power to jump start a new civilization should the previous one come to an abrupt halt. John Tukey was deemed to be one of those individuals.

If John Tukey was a very valuable person in 1962, traditional priests were just as important to African states in antiquity.  It was the priests who developed the sacred art of writing, and only they knew how to write. Unfortunately, in antiquity, when the African civilizations were being destroyed by foreign invaders, the priests were neither rescued nor protected as John Tukey was in 1962. The priests became easy targets for the foreign mercenaries, and as the priests died so did the civilization and the knowledge of writing they exclusively possessed. Needless to say,  if the knowledge of writing had not been kept secret from the public and exclusive to the priests, the knowledge would not have died with the priests.       

In conclusion, the Efik, Ibibios and Igbos lost their indigenous Nsibidi script because their leaders failed to rescue the priests who were the most valuable individuals in their society when their civilization was being destroyed by foreign enemies. As these priests were exterminated, so was the knowledge of writing they exclusively possessed. Today, the Efik, Ibibios and Igbos now use Latin, a derivative of Phoenician script, to transliterate their phonetic sounds.