Njoya, 1896: a script born in the Bamum kingdom.
In 1896, King Ibrahim Njoya had a dream: a man told him to draw a hand on a board and wash it. From it he devised a script for his language.
The first version had several hundred pictograms. Njoya simplified it through six successive stages until he reached a syllabary of 80 signs, known as A-ka-u-ku — after its first four letters.
ꚠ ꚡ ꚢ ꚣ
Taught in the schools of the kingdom, the script was used to write a chronicle of the Bamum people, a pharmacopoeia and a legal code. Then in 1919, the French colonial administration banned its teaching and destroyed the presses along with much of the written record.
Since 2007, a revival movement has brought it back into use in Foumban. It entered Unicode in 2009 (block U+A6A0–U+A6FF), which is why it can live on our screens — and on this site.
📚 Shüpamom today has between 250,000 and 650,000 speakers, in the Noun department, around Foumban.