Amadou Ndiaye holds a Braille pill in Bamako, Mali, Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025. Credit score: AP Picture/Moustapha Diallo
Amadou Ndiaye meticulously ran his fingers throughout bumps in a chunk of paper, making sense of the world he can not see.
200 years have handed because the invention of braille, the tactile writing system that has remodeled the lives of many blind and partially sighted individuals by providing a path to literacy and independence.
“Braille helped me live my life,” mentioned Ndiaye, a social employee in Mali who misplaced his eyesight as a toddler. “Before, people asked themselves the question: Here is someone who can’t see, how will he make it? How will he integrate into society?”
The West African nation, with a inhabitants of over 20 million individuals, has lengthy struggled to combine blind and partially sighted individuals. In response to eye care charity Sightsavers, round 170,000 individuals in Mali are considered blind.
The 47-year-old Ndiaye was lucky to attend the institute for the blind in Mali, the place he realized to write down in braille, and advised himself: “Really, everything that others do, I can do too.” He later attended college.
He mentioned braille has allowed him to develop his most important ardour, enjoying the guitar, which additionally emphasizes the significance of contact.
Blind artists Mariam Doumbia and Amadou Ndiaye carry out in Bamako, Mali, Friday, Jan. 10, 2025. Credit score: AP Picture/Moustapha Diallo
“Each pressure on the strings, each movement of the finger on the neck, becomes a living note, loaded with meaning,” Ndiaye mentioned.
The guitar is an integral a part of Mali’s griot custom, the cultural follow of storytelling by means of music. Musicians tailored the guitar to emulate the sounds of conventional string devices just like the kora. Native artists corresponding to Ali Farka Touré have fused Malian melodies with components of the blues, making a soulful, hypnotic sound that has gained worldwide acclaim.
Iconic Malian musical duo Amadou and Mariam woke up Ndiaye’s ardour for the instrument when he was a boy.
“One day, near a photography studio, I heard their music resonating through the window, which pushed me to discover this universe,” he mentioned.
Generally known as “the blind couple from Mali,” the duo of Amadou Bagayoko, who misplaced his imaginative and prescient at age 16, and Mariam Doumbia, who turned blind at age 5 as a consequence of untreated measles, rose to worldwide fame within the Nineties with their fusion of conventional Malian music, rock, and blues.
A Braille alphabet on show in Bamako, Mali, Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025. Credit score: AP Picture/Moustapha Diallo
The couple met at Mali’s institute for the blind, the place Doumbia was learning braille and instructing lessons in dance and music.
At such locations, braille has allowed college students to beat instructional obstacles corresponding to taking longer to discover ways to learn and write. They’ll then take the identical exams as anybody else, which permits them to hunt employment, mentioned Ali Moustapha Dicko, who teaches on the institute for the blind within the capital, Bamako.
Dicko can also be blind. Utilizing a particular typewriter, he can create texts in braille for his college students. However he says his college students are nonetheless at a drawback.
“We have a crisis of teaching materials,” Dicko mentioned. He has one studying e-book in braille for his complete class of dozens of scholars.
However with the event of latest applied sciences, some blind and partially sighted individuals hope that instructional obstacles will proceed to fall.
Ali Moustapha Dicko, who teaches on the institute for the blind, reveals using a Commonplace Perkins Braille machine in Bamako, Mali, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. Credit score: AP Picture/Moustapha Diallo
Ali Moustapha Dicko, who teaches on the institute for the blind, reveals using a Commonplace Perkins Braille machine in Bamako, Mali, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. Credit score: AP Picture/Moustapha Diallo
Amadou Ndiaye holds a Braille pill in Bamako, Mali, Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025. Credit score: AP Picture/Moustapha Diallo
“There is software, there are telephones that speak, so there are many things that are vocal,” mentioned Bagayoko of the musical duo. “This allows us to move forward.”
However Moussa Mbengue, the Senegal-based program officer for inclusive schooling at Sightsavers, mentioned such advances nonetheless do not make the leap that braille did two centuries in the past.
“It cannot replace braille. On the contrary, for me, technology complements braille,” he mentioned.
© 2025 The Related Press. All rights reserved. This materials might not be printed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed with out permission.
Quotation:
200 years after the creation of braille, blind individuals in Mali say it has allowed them to slot in (2025, March 20)
retrieved 20 March 2025
from https://medicalxpress.com/information/2025-03-years-creation-braille-people-mali.html
This doc is topic to copyright. Other than any truthful dealing for the aim of personal examine or analysis, no
half could also be reproduced with out the written permission. The content material is supplied for data functions solely.
