The origin of all of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s work stems from a revelatory experience: on March 11, 1948, ‘the heavens opened up before my eyes and seven colourful suns described a circle of beauty around their Mother-Sun: I became Cheik Nadro: He who does not forget.’ From then on Bouabré tackled every field of knowledge, his manuscripts revealing his extensive research on the arts, poetry, folk tales, religion, aesthetics and philosophy; evidence, indeed, of an astonishing thinker, poet, encyclopaedist and creator. Searching for a way to preserve and transmit the knowledge of the Bete people, as well as the knowledge of the entire world, he invented an alphabet of 448 monosyllabic pictograms to represent the phonetics of linguistic syllables.

This endeavour earned Bouabré the legendary reputation of being another Champollion, in reference to the great scholar and linguist Jean-Paul Champollion (1790–1832) who discovered the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. Bouabré’s alphabet, which transcribes human sound, reflects on the essence of his thoughts: to achieve universality and unite mankind.