Kisimi Kamara (1890–1962) was a simple

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to ...

tailor from

Sierra Leone Sierra Leone,)]. officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea surrounds the northern half of the nation. Covering a total area of , Sierra ...

who gave his people the gift of

writing Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically Epigraphy, inscribed, Printing press, mechanically transferred, or Word processor, digitally represented Symbols (semiot ...

. He invented the Mende syllabary in 1921.

Early life

Kisimi Kamara was born in 1890 in the village of Vaama,

Pujehun District Pujehun District is a district in the Southern Province of Sierra Leone. Pujehun District is one of the sixteen Districts of Sierra Leone. Its capital and largest city is the town of Pujehun . The other major towns in the district include Gandor ...

in the Southern Province of Sierra Leone to a Kuranko father and a Mandingo mother. His parents had long lived in the Pujehun District, a Mende predominant district. As a child Kisimi had no access to Western education, where he could have learned

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

. Instead his parents sent him Arabic language school under the local Karamoko, but his fellow villagers knew him as a man of unusual intelligence and energy. Kisimi had seen how the British had taken over the country and subjected the chiefs to their will. He felt that the white man's power derived, to some extent, from his ability to read and write, and he vowed that his own people should have the same ability. In 1921, Kisimi was inspired by a dream or vision. He shut himself up alone in his house for ten weeks, and then emerged with a fully complete system of

. He had developed what linguists call a

syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...

, a set of characters representing consonant-vowel combinations. Kisimi called his new writing " Ki-ka-ku" for the first three letters in a system containing a total of 195 symbols. He devised a method for teaching Ki-ka-ku, and opened a school at Potoru, Pujehun District. During the 1920s and 1930s, Kisimi Kamara became a famous man in the Mende country, as many people learned to read and write in this Ki-ka-ku system. His writing became popular for record-keeping and correspondence, and some chiefdom clerks adopted it for official use. But, in the 1940s, the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

established the Protectorate Literacy Bureau in Bo which began teaching people to read and write Mende in a modified version of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

. Kisimi Kamara's system of writing gradually fell into disuse and was forgotten, and in his later years Kisimi was disappointed that his system had been abandoned.

Death

He died in 1962 and was buried in his home town of Vaama. Kisimi's brilliant invention was destroyed by colonialism, but his work inspired among his people a pride in their native language and a determination to develop it to its full potential.

References

External links

*https://web.archive.org/web/20071214153102/http://www.sierra-leone.org/heroes7.html {{DEFAULTSORT:Kamara, Kisimi 1890 births 1962 deaths Sierra Leonean writers People from Pujehun District