Which African script, invented in the 1800s, writes the Vai language?

The Vai syllabary of Liberia, devised around 1833 by Momolu Duwalu Bukele, who said the design came to him in a dream. It is one of the few writing systems in history whose inventor is known by name and whose creation can be dated.

It is a syllabary rather than an alphabet - each of its roughly 200 characters is a whole syllable, not a single sound - and it spread without schools, taught person to person, used for letters, accounts and records. That last part made it academically valuable in an unexpected way: because literacy in Vai was learned informally and outside any classroom, it let researchers in the 1970s separate the effects of literacy itself from the effects of schooling, which are otherwise impossible to disentangle.

The result went against expectations. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole found that literacy alone did not produce the general leap in abstract reasoning that had been widely assumed; what it produced were specific skills tied to the specific uses people put it to. Vai was one of several West African scripts created in this period - Nsibidi, Bamum, N'Ko and others - a wave of independent invention that is not much taught.