Rulers · fl. c. 1830s, Jondu, Cape Mount
Dualu Bukele
Vai inventor of the Vai syllabary, one of the few writing systems independently created in modern times.
Biography
Bukele was a Vai man of the Cape Mount district who, according to the account he gave to Sigismund Koelle in 1849, received the design of a script in a dream and worked it out with a small circle of associates — Dzara Baro, Kali Bara and others — at Jondu.
The dream is not the whole story. Bukele lived in a commercial world that already knew what writing did: Arabic was written around him by Muslim clerics and traders, and English by ship-captains keeping accounts. What he produced was neither borrowed alphabet nor imitation but a syllabary fitted to Vai phonology — roughly two hundred signs, each a whole syllable.
Historical significance
Bukele's invention refutes the premise that literacy arrived on this coast with settlers in 1822. It was already being made, from the inside, by a people with their own reasons for wanting records.
Timeline
- c. 1832–33Devises the syllabary at Jondu with his associates
- 1834Script in use for letters and trade accounts
- 1849Interviewed by S. W. Koelle, who publishes the account
On the map
Associated with Jondu, Cape Mount. Open the historical atlas.
Related entries
References
- Koelle, S. W. (1854). Outlines of a Grammar of the Vei Language.
- Tuchscherer, Konrad & Hair, P. E. H. (2002). 'Cherokee and West Africa: Examining the Origins of the Vai Script.'
Suggested reading
- Scribner, Sylvia & Cole, Michael (1981). The Psychology of Literacy.