How it began
The script was created around 1908 to 1910 by Usa Atumisi Afáka, an Okanisi (Ndyuka) Maroon of eastern Suriname, to write the Okanisi or Ndyuka language. Omniglot gives the year as 1908; other accounts give 1910. By his own story, Afáka received the characters in dreams one by one and wrote each on paper the next day, arriving at 56 characters. He taught the script to about 30 people around him, including men, women and children. One of the first was his relative Abena.
Before it existed
Omniglot notes that there was no tradition of literacy among Ndyuka speakers before the script. The language is an English-based creole spoken in parts of Suriname and French Guiana. The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets reports that about 116,000 people speak it today.
How it works
Afaka is a syllabary: each character stands for a syllable. It is written from left to right in horizontal lines, and a vertical line serves as both comma and full stop. Omniglot describes the glyphs as based on Latin and Arabic letters and numerals and on traditional African symbols. The script does not represent all the sounds of the Ndyuka language.
How it spread
The script reached outside notice in 1915, when Brother Bernard, a Catholic missionary in Suriname, saw Abena reading a book in unknown symbols. Abena had him dictate Catholic prayers in Ndyuka and wrote them down in the script. Father Morssink, a colleague, studied and promoted the script with limited success. Afáka's first letter was copied into the Patili Molosi Buku in about 1917. Knowledge passed through a line of head teachers called Edebukuman.
Who pushed back
According to Omniglot, as the script became associated with European missionaries, Ndyuka speakers came to see it as a religious script unsuitable for everyday purposes. Together with its incomplete fit to the sounds of the language, this limited its use, and Ndyuka is now usually written in the Latin script.
Where it stands today
The number of users has shrunk to a handful. After the death of the third head teacher, Alufaisi, in 1993, André R.M. Pakosie, an Okanisi captain living in the Netherlands, took the role. The script appears in the work of the Okanisi artist Marcel Pinas, and on the Moiwana Monument, where the names of victims of the 1986 massacre are written in Latin and Afaka. The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets calls it the only indigenous writing system of South America still in use.
