How it began
Around 1895 and 1896 Ibrahim Njoya, king of Bamum in what is now western Cameroon, set out to create a script for the language of his people. He asked his subjects to send him signs and images that could serve as symbols, so the script drew on shapes familiar to the people who would use it. The first version, developed in 1896 and 1897, had 465 pictograms and ten characters for digits.
How it works
Njoya reworked the script repeatedly. The stages are known as phases A to G. He dropped and added characters in 1899 and 1900, cut the set to 371 around 1902, and to 285 and then 195 around 1907 and 1908. By about 1910 the script had 82 characters and worked as a semi-syllabary, each sign standing for a syllable. The last stage, around 1918, has 80 characters, ten of which serve as both syllables and digits.
Who pushed back
After World War I the French took control of the kingdom from Germany. The colonial authorities destroyed the libraries and the printing press, many books in the script were lost, and teaching it in schools was banned. Njoya was exiled to Yaounde in 1931, where he died, and the script fell out of use.
What changed first
The script was used for the administrative map of the kingdom, records, legal codes, history, genealogy, letters, folktales, a calendar and a pharmacopoeia of traditional medicine. Njoya opened schools in Foumban, the capital, and in surrounding towns to teach it, built libraries, and in 1918 had copper type cast for printing.
Where it stands today
After independence in 1960 Njoya's son and heir Seidou Njimoluh gathered surviving manuscripts in the palace museum. The Bamum Scripts and Archives Project at the palace photographs and copies documents and from 2006 worked on a computer font. Bamum was added to Unicode in 2009, and the historical stages followed in 2010.
