Starting today: our spring fundraiser to support the remarkable Bamum script

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Spring is the time of rebirth, renewal—exactly what we are trying to do for many of the world’s minority cultures by supporting their writing systems.

So this is our pledge: each year we’ll commit to a spring fundraiser dedicated to helping rejuvenate, revitalize and revivify a specific endangered alphabet, near or far.

This year’s Spring Fundraiser starts today, and ends on June 28, and we’re beginning with an indigenous script that was created and developed by a remarkable person, used for astonishingly imaginative purposes, then crushed almost out of existence by a colonial authority. If ever a script deserved reviving, it is the Bamum script from Cameroon, in West Africa.

King Ibrahim Njoya teaching his new script to the members of his court. Image courtesy of @incunabula.

Here’s the story.

Starting around 1896, twenty-five-year-old King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom in Cameroon, a man of extraordinary and varied talents, invented a script for his people’s language called a-ka-u-ku, after its first four characters.

He invited his subjects to send or give him simple signs and symbols, and he and two advisers selected from them and streamlined the script over a decade until, by roughly 1910, it was a fully functional syllabary of eighty characters.

Using this script, he wrote a history of his people, a pharmacopoeia, a calendar, maps, records, legal codes and a guide to good sex. He built schools, a printing press and libraries; he supported artists and intellectuals.

When the French took over Cameroon, though, they maneuvered Njoya out of power, smashed his printing press, burned his libraries and books, tossed out sacred Bamum artifacts and sent him into exile, where he died.

Ever since, Njoya’s descendants and others have tried to revive their script, without success. Now the Endangered Alphabets Project is going to do our best to help them rejuvenate, revitalize and revivify, and we’ve been discussing several exciting possibilities:

  • Publishing learning materials in the Bamum script, as we did with the minority scripts of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/endangeredatlas/100-words-for-a-childrens-endangered-language-dict) and for the Abenaki in the United States;
  • Soliciting poetry in the Bamum script and publishing it in a unique parallel-text edition;
  • Creating learning games, as we have done for several languages/scripts/cultures (www.ulusgame.com).
  • Sculpt carvings in the Bamum script for display throughout the kingdom.

We’ll keep you posted with updates to let you know some of the exciting, ambitious and potentially game-changing collaborations we’re setting up…

…but only with your help. Our goal is $17,500. You can donate easily through our PayPal portal at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/how-to-support-us/; or, if you are happier making old-school financial transactions, by all means send us a check, payable to The Endangered Alphabets Project, to 1001 Highlands Road, Keeseville, NY 12944.

The people of Bamum love and revere King Njoya’s script and are eager for help bringing it back to life. The Endangered Alphabets Project stands ready to have a direct and personal impact on the lives of children who will have the chance to grow up speaking, writing, and learning to respect their own language, their own culture and history.

Thanks so much for your support.

Tim Brookes

Executive Director, the Endangered Alphabets Project