How it began
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, born in 1923, was among the first generation in Côte d'Ivoire to be formally taught to write. He worked as a civil servant until a vision on March 11, 1948, led him to give himself to art and to recording Bété culture. He concluded that he needed an African writing system to work in. Over the course of the 1950s he created the syllabary by drawing hundreds of one-syllable words of his language.
Before it existed
The Bété languages had no writing system before this one. They were not taught in schools, and all education was in French. Bouabré set out to turn an oral language into written form, borrowing the medium of the French colonizers while subverting it.
How it works
The syllabary has about 440 pictographic characters. Each shows a scene or object from daily life whose one-syllable Bété name gives the sign its sound. Signs are then combined by sound to spell longer words, on the rebus principle. It is written from left to right. Bouabré first set it out in a work titled La Methodologie de la Nouvelle Ecriture Africaine "Bete", written in a notebook.
Where it stands today
The syllabary has been used in teaching Bété people to read their language. A student of Bouabré, Dodo Bai, produced a handwritten translation of a French encyclopedia article in it. It is not yet in Unicode, though working documents were prepared in 2019. Bouabré died in 2014, and museums exhibit the alphabet with his drawings.
