Mende People - Mende Syllabary

Mende Syllabary

The Mende syllabary was invented in 1921 by Kisimi Kamara (c. 1890–1962) of Sierra Leone. Seeing how the British managed to take over his country, Kisimi concluded that their power was partly a result of their literacy. He decided to give his own people that ability. Kisimi claimed he was inspired in a dream to create the Mende syllabary, which he called Ki-ka-ku. During the 1920s and 1930s, he ran a school in southern Sierra Leone to teach Ki-ka-ku. The syllabary became a popular method of keeping records and writing letters.

During the 1940s, the British set up the Protectorate Literacy Bureau in Sierra Leone's second largest city of Bo. Its goal was to teach the Mende people to read and write with a version of the Latin alphabet. As a result, usage of Kisimi's syllabary gradually diminished and, until recently scholars thought that the script was all but forgotten.

But American historian Konrad Tuchscherer made some striking discoveries regading Ki-ka-ku in the 1990s while researching his Ph.D. thesis for the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. This was the period of Sierra Leone's civil war, and to Tuchscherer's surprise, he found that instead of impeding his research, the war actually advanced it. Thousands of Mendes were taking shelter in huge refugee camps surrounding the cities of Bo and Kenema, and the people living in those camps were organized according to their home chiefdoms, making it possible for Tuchscherer to survey the entire Mende region (about half of Sierra Leone's territory) in a relatively short period of time. And he found that the Mende syllabary, far from being forgotten, was still being used by quite a few people, mostly elderly men.

But Tuchscherer made another important discovery a few years earlier before the war broke out when he visited the town of Potoru in Pujehun District, where Kisimi Kamara came from. Tuchscherer learned that while Kisimi was the inventor of the Ki-ka-ku script, another man from the same area took the lead in spreading the script (which Tuchscherer calls "kikakui") throughout the Mende region.