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norwegian has 5 million speakers. it has courses on any language learning platform you can think of. the norwegian learning subreddit has 58k members - a bunch of passionate learners and natives who answer questions. in the last year ive managed to find 12 books in norwegian at thrift stores, book warehouses, etc. never even bothered to get some online because of this! you can watch basically any show you want in it, or at least with subtitles.

what does swahili have? swahili has around 100~ million speakers, making it the most spoken language in africa (excluding colonizer languages like french and arabic). most platforms dont have a course for it, but the few that do are incredibly poorly made and almost impossible to use to learn with. the swahili learning subreddit has only 6.7k members (and most of these people have personal ties like family, as opposed to norwegian where people just learn it randomly for fun). i have never found ANY books IN swahili. ive found two dictionaries, and they were both at speciality stores (unlike norwegian which ive found at my usual medium sized town thrift store). virtually nothing is translated to swahili. not even the fucking Lion King, which uses words from the swahili language (hakuna matata, simba, rafiki, mufasa).

im not expecting tanzania and kenya to translate every western movie ever, they have their own stories to tell (as well as some government censorship), but thats not the whole story. the west has no interest in giving their stories to africa and they have no interest in translating african stories to english.

and like. I understand Why these disparities exist. due to colonization and therefore lower education levels, there are less books in swahili in the first place. people would rather learn a language with grammar and vocabulary similarities to their own, like an indo european language. but the difference is actually fucking absurd. a language with 100 million speakers should not have this few resources. with norwegian, i could always google any niche grammar question i had and find someone online asking the same question. with swahili, i have to search through decades old grammar guides in search of an answer on my own.

"One of Yonga's personal favourites in the Frame project is Sona or Tusona, an ancient, sophisticated and now rarely used writing system.

It comes from the Chokwe, Luchazi and Luvale people, who live in the borderlands of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yonga's own north-western region of Zambia.

Geometric patterns were made in the sand, on cloth and on people's bodies. Or carved into furniture, wooden masks used in the Makishi ancestral masquerade - and a wooden box used to store tools when people were out hunting.

The patterns and symbols carry mathematical principles, references to the cosmos, messages about nature and the environment - as well as instructions on community life.

The original custodians and teachers of Sona were women - and there are still community elders alive who remember how it works.

They are a huge source of knowledge for Yonga's ongoing corroboration of research done on Sona by scholars like Marcus Matthe and Paulus Gerdes.

"Sona's been one of the most popular social media posts - with people expressing surprise and huge excitement, exclaiming: 'Like, what, what? How is this possible?'"

The Queens in Code: Symbols of Women's Power post includes a photograph of a woman from the Tonga community in southern Zambia.

She has her hands on a mealie grinder, a stone used to grind grain.

Researchers from the Women's History Museum of Zambia discovered during a field trip that the grinding stone was more than just a kitchen tool.

It belonged only to the woman who used it - it was not passed down to her daughters. Instead, it was placed on her grave as a tombstone out of respect for the contribution the woman had made to the community's food security.

Sometimes translated as “demon”, “devil” or “ogre”, an oni is a traditional Japanese monster typically depicted as wearing a tiger pelt and carrying an iron club. They usually have red or blue skin and horns. They are popular characters in Japanese fairy tales and legends.

In early February the annual bean-throwing festival is practiced to drive out oni and to welcome in spring. People throw beans at someone dressed as an oni, and shout “Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" (「鬼は外！福は内！」, "Oni out! Good luck in!")

Below is a photo of a shrine in Osaka which looks like an oni. I did a double-take when I first saw it.