Although Mengistu's regime lifted the ban and reluctantly allowed the use of the Sabean script, it continued to pay only lip service to the development of Afaan Oromo. For instance, the regime made the teaching of Afaan Oromo illegal at any level in its school system. About five months after the collapse of Mengistu's regime in May 1991, the OLF convened a meeting of Oromo intellectuals on November 3, 1991. The purpose of the meeting was to adopt the Latin script the OLF had been using or suggest an alternative. After a six-hour deliberation, it was unanimously decided that the Latin script be adopted.
Iconography consists of drawings of animals or objects.
The drawings are disconnected and fragmented, and they are intended to give just a static impression. Later standardized pictures were selected, arranged in a series, and were made to tell a story the same way as today's action photographs do. Iconography was common among North American Indian tribes. Logography is the use of signs to represent words. The Chinese, which uses a minimum of 4000 characters, is the only language that uses the logographic writing system to date.