In Foumban, capital of the Bamum kingdom, Sultan Ibrahim Njoya set out around 1896 to do something unprecedented: create a writing system from scratch for his people. Over roughly fifteen years, until 1910, the script evolved from several hundred pictograms into a far more compact semi-syllabary.
The sultan went further still, inventing a language of his own, Shümom, and using the new script to record the kingdom's history and laws. Abandoned during the colonial era, Bamum script is now the subject of renewed scholarly interest: it is studied and has been digitized, notably by the U.S. Library of Congress.
Sources: Library of Congress, Wikipedia (Bamum script).
