Vai

Vai (Vai: ꕙꔤ) is a Western Mande language of Liberia and Sierra Leone, famous for being the only one of the 20+ indigenous African writing systems to have been invented in pre-colonial Africa and to remain in continuous use to the present day. The Vai syllabary was developed around 1832 by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ in a dream-vision and refined by his colleagues — making it both the oldest indigenous African script and one of the few worldwide that emerged in pre-literate societies through individual invention rather than borrowing. The script remained in active community use through the colonial period and was encoded in Unicode 5.1 (2008). The Vai people are linguistically Mande but culturally Mande-Mande/Atlantic boundary, with extensive trade contact patterns.