The Kingdom That Wrote Itself Down
Between 1896 and about 1910 the ruler of a kingdom in western Cameroon designed six successive writing systems for his own language, narrowing a pictographic set of five or six hundred signs down to a syllabary of around eighty. Then he opened schools to teach it, cast metal type to print it, and had his territory surveyed and mapped with every place name written in it.
The palace at Foumban was finished in 1917 and it is still a court: a sultan lives in it, an archivist works in it, and since April 2024 a new museum stands across the square with a two-headed serpent over the entrance and a spider on the roof. Inside are more than ten thousand objects that had spent decades crammed into the palace rooms. Among them, in cases and on paper, is a writing system that exists nowhere else on earth and was designed by one man for one language in the space of about fourteen years.
Ibrahim Njoya was the seventeenth sultan of Bamum, a kingdom Foumban dates to the end of the fourteenth century, and he ruled from around 1887 until the French removed him. His problem, as he described it, was ordinary and serious: the history of the kingdom was held orally, and oral transmission drops things. He wanted a record that did not depend on who was alive to recite it. What he did about that is the reason people who study writing systems know the name of a Cameroonian sultanate.
Six versions in fourteen years
He began in 1896 with pictures. The first system had somewhere between five and six hundred characters, each standing for a thing or an idea, and it worked as a mnemonic more than as writing. He then revised it, and revised the revision, and kept going: six successive scripts, each one shorter and more abstract than the last, as signs stopped representing objects and started representing sounds. By around 1910 he had arrived at a syllabary of roughly eighty characters, which is called a-ka-u-ku after its first four signs. That trajectory — pictographic to logographic to syllabic — is the same road Mesopotamian and Chinese writing took over centuries, compressed into one reign and documented as it happened.
Schools, type and a map
A script nobody uses is a curiosity, and Njoya treated it as an administrative problem rather than an intellectual one. The first school opened in 1912; by 1918 something like twenty were running with more than three hundred pupils between them, and the number established across the reign is usually given as forty-seven. Estimates of how many of his subjects could read the script put it at around six hundred in 1907 and above a thousand by the early 1920s. In 1918 he had metal sorts cast by the lost-wax method so the script could be printed. He commissioned surveys of the kingdom in 1912 and again in 1920, which produced a map — the Book of the Country — drawn with standardised symbols and colours and with every settlement and river labelled in Bamum. He also wrote: a history of the dynasty, a pharmacopoeia of local medicine, and books that ran to fiction.
Inventing a script took fourteen years. Keeping one in use requires a state, and by 1931 there was no longer a state in the Grassfields that answered to Foumban.
What the administration did about it
Bamum had been inside German Kamerun, and Njoya had managed that relationship well enough. After 1916 the territory passed to France, formalised as a League of Nations mandate in 1922, and the French took a different view of a king who ran his own schools in his own script and had his own map of his own borders. His powers were stripped in stages through the 1920s. In 1931 he was removed to Yaoundé, where he died on 30 May 1933. The printing press did not survive the period, and the accounts do not agree on how: some hold that the French destroyed it, others that Njoya broke up the type himself around 1920 in frustration at the administration. Either way the schools closed, French-language education replaced them, and after 1931 the script effectively went out of use.
The long return
It did not disappear, because the archive did not. Njoya's successor, Sultan Seidou Njimoluh Njoya, reopened a school teaching the script in 1985. From the mid-2000s the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project, based at the palace, set out to catalogue what was left, and the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme funded the digitisation of the palace collection — correspondence, journals, calendars, maps, medical and scientific papers created between the 1870s and the 1970s, in several of Njoya's successive script variants alongside French, English and Arabic. In October 2009 the eighty-eight characters of the a-ka-u-ku syllabary were encoded in Unicode, with several hundred more covering the earlier pictographic phases added in the following release. The script can now be typed, searched and rendered on any machine that has a font for it.
Being encoded is not the same as being used. A writing system stays alive when people write shopping lists in it, not when it is available in a character standard, and Bamum today is a language most of whose speakers read and write in the Latin alphabet, in French, because that is what school and work require. The script survives in the palace, in the museum captions, on signage around Foumban, in the hands of a small number of teachers and calligraphers, and in an archive that is now safer than it has been in ninety years. That is a real outcome and it is a narrower one than Njoya was aiming at.
What is in Foumban now
The museum that opened on 13 April 2024 was begun eleven years earlier by Sultan Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya, who died in 2021 without seeing it finished, and completed under his son. The serpent at the door stands for power and the spider above it for work and wisdom, which is a fair summary of the argument the building is making about the kingdom. Walk the artisans' street below it and you will find the same thing in another medium: bronze cast by lost wax, the technique that produced the type in 1918, in workshops where it never stopped. Njoya's point was that a kingdom which does not write itself down is at the mercy of whoever does. He was right about that, and Foumban has spent the last forty years proving it the slow way.