How it began
According to the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, the script was conceived around 1917 by Mohamed Turay, an Islamic scholar in the town of Maka in Sierra Leone. His version had 42 characters. His student and son-in-law Kisimi Kamara, from the town of Vaama, added another 150 syllabic characters. Some accounts, including those repeated by Yale's archives, credit Kamara, a tailor, with the creation and date it to 1921. The name Kikakui comes from the first three characters.
How it works
Kikakui is a syllabary: each character stands for a syllable of Mende. It is written from right to left. The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets reports that Turay and Kamara drew on the Vai syllabary, Arabic writing, an existing body of Mende graphic symbols and their own invention.
How it spread
Beginning in the 1920s Kamara promoted the script beyond the Barri chiefdom, across southern and eastern Sierra Leone. ScriptSource notes that Mende is spoken by almost 1.5 million people. In the 1940s the British set up the Protectorate Literacy Bureau in Bo, which taught a Latin-based spelling for Mende. The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets reports that use of the syllabary began to decline from then on.
Where it stands today
The scholar Konrad Tuchscherer worked with Michael Everson on a proposal to encode the script in Unicode. As of early 2023 the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets reported small signs of revival: Tuchscherer was teaching a class in which students wrote stories and poems in Kikakui and collected Mende proverbs, and Mohamed Pujeh planned a Kikakui dictionary and was working with Google on a digital keyboard version.
