Linguistist

30 September 2026

Around 1917, in a town called Maka in Barri Chiefdom, in the south of Sierra Leone, an Islamic scholar named Mohamed Turay made a way to write Mende down.

He did not invent writing. He borrowed. He had the Arabic script he taught from the Quran every day, the Vai syllabary documented in Liberia in the 1830s, and the pictograms and secret marks Mende people already used for other things. He put them together into about forty-two characters, ordered by sound and by shape, and named it Kikakui after the first three consonant sounds.

A young Kuranko man, Kisimi Kamara, learned it from him. Kamara was Turay's Quranic student, and his nephew, and his son-in-law. He kept at it. He added more than a hundred and fifty characters. Then he did the thing that made it real: he walked. He carried the script through Mendeland until people who had never written their own language could write it, and by the middle of the century he was one of the most important chiefs in the south. He is often named now, wrongly, as the man who invented it.

For a while it held. Courts kept their records in it, and the men who could read it had a trade.

Then the 1930s came, and the colonial authorities chose an alphabet instead. Diedrich Westermann's Africa Alphabet, Latin letters, one set for a whole continent. The Methodists weighed Kikakui for the Bible and chose the alphabet too, for its efficiency.

The record now calls Kikakui a failed script. A few hundred people still use it, most of them to write passages of the Quran, where every character was settled before any committee existed.

A script is a thing people build, and it gets messier the more they add to it, the way most things do. The first forty-two had a dot that told you which vowel. The next hundred and fifty stopped being that careful. It kept going anyway.