Syllabaries, Scripts and National Identities
On 20th June, 2025 Fim Magazine (online) reported the presentation of a new Hausa Syllabary, ASALI, by Dr. Korao Hamadou from the Republic of Niger. Facing attendees at the conference—including language experts—Dr. Hamadou presented what he created and imagined to be a new Hausa syllabary. An intense question and answer session followed, but Dr. Hamadou was not ready to unveil his new syllabary yet, and asks for patience till the proper time. But, first, what is syllabary?
A syllabary is a writing system where each symbol (or character) represents a syllable, which is a unit of pronunciation consisting of a vowel sound, or a vowel and one or more consonants. It’s a way to represent language in writing where the syllable, rather than individual sounds (like letters in an alphabet), is the basic unit. To cut through the morass in Hausa, you could say that “syllabary na nufin ƙirƙiro da haruffan da za su wakilci wani harshe, yadda su waɗannan sababbin haruffan ba su da alaƙa da haruffan Larabci ko kuma Latinanci, watau haruffan boko.”
Examples of syllabaries include Japanese Kana (Hiragana and Katakana), Yi Syllabary (China), Cree and Ojibwe Syllabics (Canada). In West Africa, common syllabaries included N’Ko (Mande languages) and Vai (Liberia, Sierra Leone). Tifinagh (Tuareg) may look like a syllabary, but it is not; it is an alphabet (consonant-vowel script). In northern Nigeria, the first Hausa syllabary was created by Eng. Musa Abdullahi in 1988.
The first known syllabary in West Africa is the Vai syllabary, developed around 1833 in Liberia by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ. He reportedly conceived the idea in a dream, where a tall, dignified white man in a long coat appeared and told him, “I am sent to you by other white men … I bring you a book.” In the dream, Bukɛlɛ was shown numerous symbols. Although he couldn’t recall them upon waking, he later collaborated with friends to invent new ones for the Vai language. In 1854, the German philologist S.W. Koelle met Bukɛlɛ while conducting research on the Vai language and documented this account.
An alternative theory suggests that the Vai syllabary may have been influenced by the Cherokee syllabary. The Cherokee are an indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. They are the largest Native American tribe in the United States today. Some Cherokee emigrated to West Africa in the early 1800s, and one of them—Austin Curtis—married into a prominent Vai family and eventually became a Vai chief. It is speculated that he may have played a role in the development of the writing system.
The Vai syllabary gained widespread acceptance among the Vai people, and by the late 19th century, it was in common use. In 1962, the University of Liberia’s Standardization Committee formalized the script. A translation of the New Testament in the Vai script was published in 2003.
Another indigenous African script is the N’ko, which is not a syllabary. The N’Ko alphabet was invented by Soulemayne Kante of Kankan, Guinea, in 1949. It is mainly used by speakers of Maninka, Bambara, Dyula and their dialects in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali.
Soulemayne Kante was born in 1922. As a young man, he was angered when he read that some foreigners considered Africans cultureless since they didn’t have an indigenous writing system. In response, he developed N’ko to give African people their own alphabet to record their cultures and histories in their native languages. He wrote hundreds of educational materials in Maninka using the N’ko alphabet. His aim was to explain complex or foreign ideas to speakers of Maninka using their own language. He wrote introductory books on subjects as diverse as astrology, economics, history and religion. Publications in the N’Ko alphabet include the Qur’an, textbooks on various subjects, poetry, philosophical works, a dictionary and a number of local newspapers.
Unlike many of the other African scripts before it, N’Ko is a fully-fledged alphabet with a very distinct appearance, consisting of an eclectic mix of simple geometric shapes, angles and the occasional loop attached to a baseline running from the right to the left with letters that flow into one another, much like Arabic. The number of those who are literate in N’ko increased without government intervention or support during the colonial and independence periods and without official support from the Islamic religious community. N’ko spread at the grassroots level because it met practical needs and enabled speakers of Mande languages to take pride in their cultural heritage.
These syllabaries and scripts represent significant efforts to preserve and promote African languages and cultures through writing systems that reflect local phonetics and linguistic structures. They contribute to linguistic diversity and cultural heritage in West Africa. They are a reaffirmation of identities.
The acceptance of these scripts is so universal that Microsoft Corp. has produced a family of fonts that include these scripts as Kigelia N’ko, Kigelia Vai, and Kigelia Tifinagh. This makes it easier to use the languages in modern communication. Here is the drawing of the font scripts from the Kigelia font.
Hausa Syllabary Pioneers
The attempt to develop a uniquely Hausa syllabary has been going on for quite some time now. I counted about six or so past attempts. Let’s look at them.
1. Eng. Musa Abdullahi and TAFI (Katsina)
I am not sure, but I think the first attempt was in September 1977 by Engr. Musa D. Abdullahi, FNSE, FAEng., MFR. He published a book, “Tafi – Sabon Rubutun Hausa”. I have a copy of the book that seems self-printed, so I don’t know if it is available elsewhere. Like most of us who migrated into cultural studies to protect our inherited or self-imposed identifies using what we learn, Musa Abdullahi, who was born in 1941 studied Physics in his first degree from the University of Manchester, UK, and later an MSc in Technology. He has taught in quite a few places, including at CAS and ABU Zaria.
In an interview with Aminiya Online of Thursday July 10, 2014, he stated that while studying in Manchester, he was challenged by colleagues to show them writing in his language, i.e. Hausa. When he showed them Ajami and Boko scripts, they told him these were borrowed – and that imbued him with the idea of creating a uniquely Hausa writing system and did not rely on any prior writing system. He started this in 1962 and eventually published it as “A Study of Writing & Development of Tafi” in 1988. “Tafi” the name of his syllabary, is a shorted form of “TAFIn hannu” (palm) and “litTAFI” (book). Note, he had been experimenting with TAFI since 1977 and actually taught students when he was the Provost of CAS, Zaria, I think, how to use it, including our own Prof. Malumfashi.
TAFI was meant to be taught from elementary schools as, according to Musa Abdullahi, it might be easier for them. Taking a bold move, he also created similar syllabary in Igbo and Yoruba languages. A TAFI font was created by him, with a complete keyboard layout and is available at www.tafiwriting.com. The site provides compressive information about the technicalities of TAFI, including its font and web development. He also suggested, although there is no place to download, a TAFI font, which is ahead of Microsoft’s efforts with Kigelia which encoded N’Ko and Vai alphasyllabaries.
2. Ɗan Azimi Baba Ceɗiyar ‘Yangurasa and “Hausa writing” (Rubutun Hausa)(Kano)
A few years after the appearance of TAFI, Ɗan Azimi Baba, a Hausa novelist in Kano and Chairman of the Raina Kama Writers Association, created his own Hausa syllabary in 1983, which he called RUBUTUN HAUSA. The idea of creating the syllabary was developed while he was attending Adult Literacy classes in 1982 at Shahuci, Kano, under the tutelage of Malam Abdu Garba.
Ɗan Azimi Baba had heard Malam Abdu Garba talking about great civilizations and the scripts associated with them—Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese characters, among others—and pointed out that Nigeria, and the Hausa language in particular, had borrowed from Arabic initially and later from English. Ɗan Azimi said that he would invent a new script for Hausa, which he duly did in 1983 in just one week. He taught it to a fellow student, A’isha Uba – who subsequently became his wife: a marriage made in script!
He put the script accompanied with corresponding Roman alphabets as a key and challenged his readers to write a letter to him based on the key. Anyone doing so will be rewarded with the next three novels from the author free. He also took the script to a Raina Kama meeting where Ado Ahmad said he should write something in it, explain how it worked, and that they should put the examples of this new script in their books, along with the lists of bookshops, other available titles, and the group photograph. They then began to do this. An extract from the explanation of the purpose of the script ran as follows:
These characters have been created through pride in the Hausa language, and they are called, “Hausa writing.” These characters are not taken from any other people in the world, they have been created by the Raina Kama group in order to enrich and strengthen the Hausa language. (Baba, in the novel, “Sakaina”, 1983, p. 70).
After the script appeared, it became fashionable to use it and some hundreds of people wrote in to Ɗan Azimi and Raina Kama using it. But soon the fashion faded and the item was removed from later novels. I have samples of about 10 letters written to Ɗan Azimi from 1983 to 1995 using the Rubutun Hausa syllabary, and one of them is included in this post as part of the images. However, it did not catch on, and eventually faded.
3. Sardar Musa and Kusugu Hausa Syllabary (Kano)
The third visible Hausa syllabary developed was in 2021. I was in my office when Sardar Musa, a resident of Kano, visited me to explain the new Hausa syllabary he developed, which he called “Kusugu”. This is symbol reference to the famous Kusugu well in Daura (Katsina State, Nigeria) which allegedly housed a snake (Sarki) and which was killed by a wanderer, Abu Yazid (Bayajidda) who married the queen of the territory as a reward for his bravery. Abu Yazid’s progeny became leaders of the major Hausa kingdoms, but he was never a founder of Hausa people as erroneously and continuously propagated by ignorant historians in Nigeria and outside. When he came, he found a well-established dynasty ruled by strong and powerful women.
Sardar took Kusugu to the highest level among the developers of Hausa syllabaries. After developing the characters, he started teaching it. He has a TikTok channel (https://www.tiktok.com/@sadar_musa) where he uploaded over 35 videos of his class.
Unlike with TAFI where detailed explanations were given for the creation of the syllabary, KUSUGU has no such documentation. But the philosophy is the same – identity and pride in Hausa culture and communication. Sardar is moved by the idea of creating something unique that represents Hausa people and culture.
4. Dr Korao Hamadou Mahamadou and “Hausa Ainihi” (Niamey)
Dr. Korao, proudly Bagobiri, has every right to be proud of his antecedent heritage and identity. He is a Nigeriène academic affiliated with ASUNIL (their equivalent of our Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA). During a class on African Philosophy at Abdoul Mumin University, Niamey, he started thinking about counteracting the tutor’s narrative that Africans have no philosophy since they don’t have a writing system, and philosophy is valued by its written corpus. He argued against this, pointing out that artistic symbols on African clothing and building all communicate something, albeit arcane.
He eventually developed what he referred to as Hausa Ainihi (original Hausa) and claimed it has roots in Gobiranci. He also gave talks on international radio on his syllabary and at some universities in Nigeria. He detailed all this in his book, Allura Da Zare Ba Ta Ɓata / A threaded needle won’t get lost. In the book, he spends quite some time tracing the history of writing through various ancient cultures to set the scene for his syllabary. The book, however, is too heavy on linguistics, so heavy in fact that I just can’t wrap my head around the incessant repetition of what he calls “ƙididdigar babbaƙu”. It is definitely hard to follow both his argument and his prose.
This difficulty seems to communicate itself on Thursday, 19th June, 2025, when he presented his Hausa Ainihi syllabary at a symposium at Bayero University, Kano. His lecture elicited a very lively conversation and interest among the academics assembled there. Beside the lecture and his book, I have not been able to find any other way he communicates his Hausa Ainihi syllabary.
I have met two other individuals who have developed their own Hausa syllabary, but refused to let me take a picture. The last was in October 2024 at the International Conference on African Indigenous Languages, with the theme of “Indigenous African Languages as Instruments for Viable Development”, held on 29th October, 2024, at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. His syllabary was an admixture of graphic glyphs, Latin and Ajami. I can’t remember his name, but he was an ABU Staff.
Below are illustrations of the four syllabaries.
Hausa Syllabary | Prospects and Challenges
So, there you have it. From 1977 to 2021 there was a literal cacophony of Hausa syllabaries, developed as ethnic pride projects by disparate individuals with no connection to each other. After my last posting, my attention was drawn to additional two – Haujami by Gwani Yusuf Muhammad Zakariyya Alkanawi and Ihame by Abdulbaƙi Jari (originator of International Hausa Day celebrated annually on August 26th to commemorate the Hausa language and culture).
All of these inventors were impelled by the desire to demonstrate the ability of Hausa to create their own forms of writing, independent of either European or Arabic systems. Yet there are conditions that must be met before this can succeed. I doubt if the developers had these conditions in mind. In all of West Africa, the most successful recent syllabaries were N’Ko and Vai. Let’s see how they succeeded.
The first, Vai, was created in Liberia/Sierra Leone by Momolu Duwalu Bukele, around 1833. Three things made it succeed. First was oral to written transition: the Vai people had a strong oral tradition and no previous dominant script. The syllabary filled a void. Second, isolation and community support: the Vai community was relatively self-contained, which allowed the script to take root before colonial influences could suppress it. Finally, immediate utility – it was quickly used for record-keeping, communication, religious and medicinal texts. Note, there was no European or Arabic script to challenge it.
The second was N’Ko (Mande-speaking regions, especially Guinea, Mali, and Côte d’Ivoire). It was invented by Solomana Kante in 1949. It also succeeded because of three inter-related reasons. First was pan-ethnic cultural mission; Kante created N’Ko as a tool of cultural revival and anti-colonial resistance — to counteract the dominance of French and Arabic. Second, timely postcolonial moment at a time when many West African societies were searching for authentic cultural identities after independence. Third was literacy activism in which Kante led a dedicated educational movement, producing books, dictionaries, translations, and teaching materials in N’Ko. The script became a literacy movement, not just a writing system.
These two syllabaries became alphabets and were recognized by ICT professionals such as Microsoft which even produced a font for them (Kigelia). Thus, despite their origins being with individual initiatives (not group), they succeeded because of many factors. Among them included deep cultural resonance where both scripts were rooted in the cultural pride and identity politics of their peoples. They also have practical and symbolic value since they were not just scripts — they symbolized resistance (to colonial languages) and authenticity (of African intellectual traditions).
They were also advantaged by community buy-in. Even though the scripts were invented by individuals, they quickly gained support from local leaders, scholars, and educators. Finally, there was their script usability, since both Vai and N’Ko were carefully designed to fit the phonological systems of their languages — making them practical and intuitive for native speakers.
Despite the encouragement Hausa syllabary creators may face (as well as discouragement), the Hausa society does not meet these script requirements. This is simply because a new Hausa script today lacks the urgent symbolic or functional motivation that fueled N’Ko or Vai — unless it ties into a broader cultural movement (e.g. Ajami revivalism, postcolonial decolonization efforts, or youth identity politics). Thus for a script to be a successful part of an ethnic revival, certain conditions must be fulfilled. First, and obviously, there must be adequate desire for change among a significant number of members of the ethnic community for a revival to succeed. Second, a script must be successfully implemented and developed as a writing system.
The first and foundational concept is status and domain planning. For a script to be successfully adopted, a critical mass of the language community must decide that they want to use their language in written form, using the script. For almost all of the languages involved, there was no prior literacy in the language in another script, so they had to choose to write their language. The community will have to choose some functions, some social domains, for which they will use their written language, domains such as genealogical record keeping, personal letters, education, government documents, religion, and so on. Choosing to implement their script in these new ways is a change of status. If the status and domain decisions are too limited, or if the people making the decisions are too few, a script will not be used widely enough to be a tool for ethnic revival.
The second relevant concept from language planning is that there must be what language planners call a “corpus,” a codified form of the script and also a body of literature using the script. Those scripts that have been more successful (both as tools of ethnic revival and as writing systems) are those that have been accepted by enough of the community and have been used to publish larger bodies of literature (larger in number of titles and topics, and number of copies produced). Examples, of course, are N’Ko and Vai.
Third, there must be what language planners call “acquisition planning,” provision for some sort of efforts to teach others to use the script. The developers of TAFI (Musa Abdullahi) and Kusugu (Sardar Musa) have made these efforts, while TAFI faltered and faded, Kusugu seems to be on rise – thanks to its wider visibility on TikTok. Those scripts for which some form of teaching was carried out had greater chances of being successfully acquired by significant numbers of people, and greater chances of being successfully used in ethnic revivals. But this is an uphill task requiring commitment, devotion and buy-in. What most people would ask themselves is: why should I bother?
Creating a unique Hausa syllabary—a writing system entirely distinct from both Ajami and Boko—to represCreating a new Hausa syllabary faces significant challenges across several fronts. Legitimacy and adoption hinge on endorsements from religious leaders, academics, and traditional rulers, as a script lacking such support risks being perceived as a vanity endeavour. Addressing communicative gaps posed by established scripts like Boko and Ajami is crucial, necessitating integration into broader literacy movements.
In the end, creating a new Hausa syllabary is not impossible – almost 10 have been developed – but it demands more than linguistic creativity. It requires a pan-Hausa cultural movement, technological strategy, and political diplomacy. Without these, it risks being intellectually interesting but practically irrelevant.
* Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu, a former Vice-Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), is a senior scholar in Media and Cultural Studies at Bayero University, Kano.
