Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: The Ivorian Artist Who Invented a Writing System

In the international contemporary art world, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is one of the most frequently cited names from Côte d'Ivoire (in West Africa, French-speaking, the world's largest cocoa producer). Most of his works are no bigger than a postcard, drawn in ballpoint pen and coloured pencil on recycled cardboard, yet they are held by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His most remarkable achievement was inventing a script for his mother tongue.

One vision, a lifelong mission

According to MoMA, Bruly Bouabré was born in 1923 in Zéprégühé, a Bété village near Daloa in Côte d'Ivoire. On 11 March 1948, in Dakar, he experienced a vision: by his account, he saw seven coloured suns circling a "mother sun". NPR reports that he was then a civil servant with the colonial naval service; he regarded the experience as the starting point of his work and took the name "Cheik Nadro", meaning "the revealer".

According to the Centre Pompidou, he saw himself as a prophet, storyteller and philosopher, and only began drawing as a way of recording this revelation at around the age of fifty. He died in Côte d'Ivoire in 2014.

Creating a script for the Bété language

Bété was mainly an oral language with no writing system. The Centre Pompidou notes that, inspired by markings on small stones he found at Békora, Bruly Bouabré created in 1956 a script of 442 monosyllabic pictographic signs; the French scholar Théodore Monod, who worked with him, published the script in 1958. NPR adds that in the 1970s he lobbied the government to adopt it, but it was never officially adopted; however, a Bété–French dictionary published by the Ivorian Ministry of Education in the same period used his images as illustrations.

The script later became the basis of his best-known work: Alphabet Bété (1990–91) consists of 449 small drawings, each corresponding to a Bété syllable and depicting everyday scenes such as farming and eating; the whole set is regarded as a single work. Another series, Civilisation Bété, records everyday objects and instruments such as basket-weaving and drums in 27 drawings.

Key works and the international stage

How to appreciate his work

• Read it as an encyclopaedia: his subjects range from clay pots, animals and cigarettes to script signs and his own visions; the aim was to record knowledge, not simply to decorate.
• Notice the materials: the works in the Centre Pompidou collection are drawn in pencil, ballpoint pen and coloured pencil on cardboard packaging; the humble materials are part of how he worked.
• Look at them as sets: his works are usually presented in series; each sheet is small, and only by viewing a whole set can you see the system of knowledge he was trying to build.

One line for Asian readers

Bruly Bouabré shows how one person, with the simplest of materials, could open up the possibility of writing for an entire oral culture; appreciating his work is also appreciating the power of recording itself.

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References: MoMA — Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound; NPR — A vision of 7 suns led a self-taught Ivoirian artist (2022); Centre Pompidou — Les grandes figures historiques de notre temps