Several script inventors have said that they received their characters in a dream or vision. The Vai syllabary of Liberia is a well-documented example and, from 1834, an early independent invention of writing in modern West Africa.
The inventor was Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ (variously transcribed Momolu Duwalu Bukele, c. 1810–1850s) of the Vai people, who live along the coast of what is now Liberia and Sierra Leone. According to interviews recorded by the German missionary S. W. Koelle in 1849 — and published in his 1854 monograph Outlines of a Grammar of the Vei Language — Bukele said the script came to him around 1832–1833 in a dream:
"A tall, venerable-looking white man, in a long coat, appeared and said: 'I am sent to you by other white men ... I bring you a book.' [The visitor] then showed me many signs upon paper, but I did not understand them. ... When I woke, I called my friends together, and we set to work, and after some time we made our book." — Bukɛlɛ's account, as recorded by Koelle, 1849
Bukele did not invent the script entirely alone; he convened a small group of fellow Vai men — Wonu Wulen, Maule, and others — and the syllabary was completed collectively. The first version had roughly 200 characters, one per Vai syllable plus a handful of logograms. A standardised modern set, codified in the mid-20th century, has 212 characters.
Vai is a Mande language, like Mandinka and Bambara, with a clear (C)V(N) syllable structure and seven vowels that also carry contrastive tone. The syllabary maps that structure closely: each character represents one consonant + vowel unit, with a syllable-final nasal added as a separate sign (ꘋ). What it does not write is tone — Vai has four of them, but none appear on the page, and readers infer them from context. A few characters are pictographic in origin (the symbol for fa, "father", was originally based on a beard), but most are arbitrary geometric shapes.
- Within a decade of its 1834 unveiling, Vai script was being used for personal letters, commercial accounts, court records and Quranic glosses.
- Vai men in the 19th century routinely wrote each other letters in three scripts depending on addressee: Vai for fellow Vai, Arabic for Muslims of other groups, and Latin for Europeans.
- The script survived the Liberian civil wars (1989–2003) and the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Vai literacy became the subject of a famous 1981 study by Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy. Vai society was — and to some extent still is — a natural laboratory: many adults are literate in one, two or three scripts (Vai, Arabic, Latin), each acquired in a different setting (Vai informally from kin, Arabic in Quran schools, Latin in colonial-style schools). Scribner and Cole compared the cognitive effects of each and concluded that the "intellectual benefits of literacy" famously claimed by earlier scholars were largely specific to schooling, not to literacy as such. Vai script literacy, learned informally, did not by itself transform thinking. It was an enormously influential finding in education research.
Vai script was added to Unicode 5.1 in 2008 (block U+A500–U+A63F), and is now available on Android, iOS and major Linux distributions. There are Vai-language Wikipedia stubs, Vai keyboard layouts, and a small but persistent online community. The Vai people themselves never lost their script; today, almost 200 years after Bukele's dream, a Vai grandmother can WhatsApp her grandchild in the same syllabary that a young man in 1834 wrote on his first sheet of imported paper.
Whether the dream was metaphor or memory, Bukele understood the social technology better than many of his European contemporaries: writing is not magic, and any people who want it can have it.