The pen stops at exile

Claim (verbatim)

King Ibrahim Njoya of Bamum invented a script around 1896 and drove it through successive reforms — from the pictographic Lewa to the mature a-ka-u-ku syllabary — equipping a palace chancery, schools, court records, a religious book of his own devising, and the chronicle of the kingdom's history and customs. The French administration closed the schools; Njoya died in exile in Yaounde in 1933; script literacy collapsed within a generation. The palace archive at Foumban, digitized through the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, is thus the stratified fossil of a writing system's entire life cycle, and it should carry two signatures of loss: the earliest script stages surviving only as relics, because a working chancery discards its first drafts and recopies into the current standard; and dated production falling off a cliff at the exile rather than tapering with fashion. Prediction: in the digitized Bamum palace archive, documents written in pre-a-ka-u-ku script stages will be under 10% of script-bearing items, and dated items from the decade after Njoya's 1931 exile will number less than a fifth of the decade before it (primary clause: the fivefold post-exile production drop; the verdict follows it). Kill: the item-level metadata and images of the Bamum palace archives digitization in the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (project EAP051, with the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project, Foumban), openly browsable; the computation is a per-decade count of dated items and a script-stage tally.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the digitized Bamum palace archive, documents written in pre-a-ka-u-ku script stages will be under 10% of script-bearing items, and dated items from the decade after Njoya's 1931 exile will number less than a fifth of the decade before it (primary clause: the fivefold post-exile production drop; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the item-level metadata and images of the Bamum palace archives digitization in the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (project EAP051, with the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project, Foumban), openly browsable; the computation is a per-decade count of dated items and a script-stage tally.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The script's stage sequence (Lewa through a-ka-u-ku and mfemfe) and its collapse under French school closures and Njoya's exile are the standard narrative, and EAP051's item-level metadata is openly browsable; but per-decade dated-item counts and script-stage shares of the palace archive have not been published.

• I. Dugast & M.D.W. Jeffreys, L'ecriture des Bamum (Memoires de l'IFAN, 1950)
• EAP051, 'Bamum script and archives project: saving Africa's written heritage', British Library Endangered Archives Programme (eap.bl.uk/project/EAP051)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.