How it began
David Wabeladio Payi, born in 1957 in Bas-Congo province, created the script in 1978 in Mbanza-Ngungu, in what was then Zaire. He had finished a diploma in diesel car mechanics the year before. He said the script was revealed to him in a dream in which he saw two figures formed by the mortar joints of a brick wall. The mirrored shapes looked like the digits 2 and 5 on an electronic display, and they became the basis of the characters.
How it works
Mandombe means "that which is Black" in Kikongo. The script builds its characters from the two mirrored wall shapes and their rotations and reflections. It is read from left to right and can also be read from top to bottom. It can be used to transcribe Kikongo, Lingala, Swahili and Tshiluba as well as other Bantu languages.
How it spread
In 1982 Payi received patent No. 2505/82 for the writing system from the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Zaire, and in 1994 the script was officially presented to the public. Until his death he taught it to thousands of people at the University of Kinshasa, in Brazzaville, and in centers abroad including Brussels and Paris.
What lasted
The University of Kinshasa granted Payi an honorary doctorate on December 22, 2011, for his work on the script. He died in 2013 in Turkey, where he had gone for medical care. The script outlived him as a taught system with its own teaching centers in Central Africa and in Europe.
Where it stands today
A preliminary proposal to add Mandombe to the Unicode Standard was submitted in 2010 and a revised proposal followed in 2016, written by programmers familiar with the script. An operating system called Nzitani, formerly Lundombe, was conceived in the script so that users can write and compute in Mandombe.
