The proposal of an African reference alphabet was the result of a conference at Niamey in 1978 organized by the UNESCO. The alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended to use single letters for a sound (actually a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations or letters with diacritical marks.
The proposal included eight diacritics: acute (´), gravis (`), circumflex (^), hacek (ˇ), macron (¯) to mark tone, a tilde (˜) to mark nasalization, a subscript dot (.) and an underline mark (_). The trema was used for some vowels.
A typewriter keyboard was proposed as well: for the additional characters the uppercase letters had to be given up. Probably for this reason the keyboard did not get used. However the proposal of the additional characters as such is valuable as it reflects the needs for writing African languages. On the other side in quite some orthographies of African languages two-letter-combinations are used for representing additional sounds.
Source: A Thesaurus of African Languages - A classified and annotated inventory of the spoken languages of Africa - Michael Mann and David Dalby, International African Institute, Hans Zell Publishers, 1987
He earned (1942) a law degree from the Univ. of South Africa and was prominent in Johannesburg's youth wing of the African National Congress (ANC).
In South Africa's first multiracial elections (1994), Mandela was elected president, and served until 1999, when Thabo Mbeki succeeded him.
In Dec., 1999, Mandela was appointed by a group of African nations to mediate the ethnic strife in Burundi; the Arusha accords, a Tutsi-Hutu power-sharing agreement, were finalized in 2001.
During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing.
English is also an important minority language of South Africa (South African English), and in several other former colonies and current dependent territories of the United Kingdom and the United States, for example Singapore, Mauritius, and the Philippines.
Learners of English are in danger of being misled by native speakers who refer to American English, Australian English, British English or other varieties of English.
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