Thread by @incunabula

The Lost Script of the Begam.

In 1917, a young officer in the West African Frontier Force, Captain L. W. G. Malcolm, made a curious 'discovery' in the grassfield area of Cameroon, the details of which he submitted for publication in the Journal of the African Society. 1/20

While stationed in the town of Bagam, the principal town of the Eghap, Malcolm recorded that the Eghap employed a syllabic script to write their language. These characters, supplied to Malcolm by a retainer of the Bagam chief, were reputed to total several hundred in number. 2/20

The retainer told Malcolm that the script of the nearby Bamum was used as the basis for the script used in Bagam, and when the Bagam script broke down, characters were borrowed from the Bamum script. The Bagam chief pointed out though that the two scripts were NOT the same. 3/20

For most of the last century the story ended here. No characters were ever published. Although Malcolm submitted reproductions of the Bagam script characters to the Journal of the African Society, the journal's editor, Sir Harry H. Johnston, REFUSED TO PUBLISH THEM. 4/20

In a note to Malcolm's article, Johnston cited financial constraints for suppressing the publication of the Bagam characters. It would appear, however, that his real reasons were quite different. Johnston called the Bagam characters "arbitrary".... 5/20

....adding that "It is quite sufficient to say that they are, most of them, imitations or perversions of Roman capitals or else of the trade marks stencilled on the goods of European traders ... [they are] copied from the white man's symbols". 6/20

These were not Johnston's first perverse statements on African invented scripts. In 1906 he had called the Vai script characters "clumsy adaptations of Roman letters or of conventional signs employed by Europeans", adding that the Vai syllabary had "little logic". 7/20

Later, Johnston would again show his contempt for the Bagam script: "The characters are distorted or fantastic adaptations of Roman capital letters". Johnston was unable to recognize the originality of the Bagam script or attach value to the documentation of its characters. 8/20

In the years following the publication of Malcolm's article, scholars interested in African scripts, especially those engaged in research on the much better known Bamum script from the same grassfield area, lamented the loss of the Bagam characters. 9/20

Writing in 1922, Delafosse noted the reported existence of the Bagam script in an article on the Bamum script, and mentioned a possible connection between the two scripts, but could not add anything new as he had not seen the actual Bagam characters. 10/20

In their treatise on the Bamum script published in 1950, Dugast & Jeffreys discussed the Bagam script. In hopes of finding the characters, Jeffreys contacted the publishers of Journal of the African Society, but no trace of the characters could be found. 11/20

By this time, even the idea of contacting the former editor Johnston was futile, as he had died in 1927. Dugast and Jeffreys commented that "the loss of this documentation is great". 12/20

In 1963 Alfred Schmitt published his three-volume magnum opus on the Bamum script, Die Bamum-Schrift, and he too wrote that after Malcolm's documentation of the script, later research had failed to find any records of the Bagam script. 13/20

And so things would likely have remained, were it not for the determination of the indefatigable researcher into all things Bamum, Konrad Tuchscherer, the co-Director of the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project at the Archives du Palais des Rois Bamoun, in Foumban, Cameroon. 14/20

Tuchserer knew that while at Cambridge, Malcolm had worked under the supervision of the pioneer anthropologist A. C. Haddon, and that there is today a library at Cambridge that bears his name - the Haddon Library of Archaeology and Anthropology. 15/20

It was here that he eventually located the forgotten original draft of Malcolm's unpublished 1922 MSc thesis, "The Eghap: An ethnographical and somatological study". And it was in THIS thesis, appended to the back of volume three.... 16/20

.... that Tuscherer finally found Malcolm's transcriptions of the lost script of the Bagam, suppressed in the original article because of the racism and bigotry of the then editor, Sir Harry H. Johnston, and subsequently presumed lost for nearly a century. 17/20

The script was FINALLY published in Tuchscherer's "The Lost Script of the Bagam" [African Affairs, Vol. 98, No. 390 January 1999, OUP on behalf of The Royal African Society] to which this thread is heavily indebted. 18/20
jstor.org/stable/723684

And here, at last, in Malcolm's own handwriting from 1917, is the Bagam script, a powerful testament to the extraordinary intellectual vitality of 19th and early 20th century Cameroon, rescued by Tuchscherer from nearly a century of oblivion. 19/20

With Tuchscherer's article as the point of departure, work on the full decipherment of the Bagam script is now starting. See scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/pa…

And especially Andrij Rovenchak and Ivan Franko's "Towards the decipherment of the Bagam script". 20/20
afrikanistik-aegyptologie-online.de/archiv/2009/19…

Thank you for reading such a long thread - I thought this was an interesting and in the end, a rather moving story. Here, fittingly, is the concluding paragraph of Konrad Tuchscherer's seminal 1999 paper.