Maninka has been written in three systems and each carries a different claim. Arabic script adapted for the language, the practice generally called Ajami in West Africa, has been used for centuries for correspondence, amulets, legal instruments and devotional verse, and it is bound up with the authority of Muslim clerical families.
The Latin alphabet arrived with colonial administration and mission printing and is the standard of state literacy work in Guinea and Mali today. The third is N'Ko, a script devised in 1949 by Souleymane Kante of Kankan, written from right to left, with letters shaped to fit Manding phonology and a full set of tone marks; Kante created it as a direct answer to the claim that African languages had no writing of their own, and it has since acquired newspapers, a body of translated and original literature, and in some circles a cultural and religious movement around it.
None of the three has displaced the others. The point of interest for this atlas is that the material which matters most in Maninka, the epic and the praise repertoire, is exactly the material that resists being written at all, because a recitation is shaped to the occasion, the patron and the audience in front of the speaker, and a printed text fixes one performance as though it were the work itself.