Mandombe is usually presented as a native script used to write Kikongo and several other languages in the Democratic Republic of Congo – a script invented in the late 1970s by David Wabeladio Payi, who claims it was revealed to him by Simon Kimbangu, the prophet of Kimbanguism. But, as Ramon Sarró’s book shows, there is much more to Mandombe and its invention than this conventional narrative suggests.
Sarró’s deeply personal book is above all a tribute to David Wabeladio Payi, who was a friend of the author’s for the last four years of his life, before Wabeladio’s premature death in 2013. The book’s focus is, in large part, biographical; the overall tone is one of unabashed celebration. Part II, which forms the core of the book, is a biography-qua-autobiography of Wabeladio, who also co-wrote that section. Parts III and IV put Mandombe and its genesis into context, investigating, among other things, Mandombe’s connection with Congolese identity, and its manifold nature: a script that is also a form of art and a lesson in geometry.
The turning point in Wabeladio’s life is the mystical crisis that he underwent in 1978, culminating in the invention of the basic geometric shapes that would later form the basis of the Mandombe writing system. In the decade that followed, Wabeladio developed his invention single-mindedly, facing near unanimous disapproval and incomprehension. One of the book’s contributions is to show how different Mandombe was, in its first decades of existence, from what it would later become. At its core, Wabeladio’s invention is a set of geometric shapes coupled with a series of geometric operations (like rotation or mirror inversion) that can be used to generate novel shapes. The idea of using this system as the basis for a writing system was not clearly present until the late 1980s at the earliest. As for the religious or ideological meaning of Wabeladio’s system, it was just as difficult to grasp during this decade. Wabeladio was and remained a devout Catholic until 1988, even though he never doubted that this 1978 revelation derived from prophet Simon Kimbangu (a claim that Sarró fact-checked with several direct witnesses to the event). Even after Wabeladio’s conversion to Kimbanguism, Mandombe retained important ties with other religious movements, such as Bundu dia Kongo – Wabeladio’s ambivalence towards this movement notwithstanding. (Bundu dia Kongo is a political and religious movement whose beliefs revolve around Kongo ethnicity.)
As for politics, the tight identification of Wabeladio’s system with Kongo culture seems to have solidified no earlier than the mid-1990s, with the coining of the name Mandombe (lit. ‘for the Africans’) and the founding of the Centre de l’Écriture Négro-Africaine (the chief organization in charge of disseminating and teaching Mandombe). In any case, it was thanks to the institutional infrastructure provided by Kimbanguism, Bundu dia Kongo and Kongo cultural institutions that Mandombe took off and attained its current position as an iconic Congolese script.
Mandombe may owe its diffusion and fame to its use as a writing system, but this aspect of Wabeladio’s invention is not central to Sarró’s book. Readers, for example, should not expect a detailed examination of Mandombe’s semiology as a writing system. Is Mandombe an abugida or (as Sarró claims) an alphabet? How does Mandombe handle tones? Such questions are not raised and the author has an excellent reason for neglecting them. Many people learn to write in Mandombe, but very few routinely use it for that purpose. Almost all users of Mandombe are already literate in the Roman alphabet (Sarró mentions only one observation to the contrary, on p. 21). The system is, by its inventor’s own admission, cumbersome and difficult to learn; once learned, it is soon forgotten for lack of practice. One gets a sense (even though Sarró does not say so explicitly) that learning and teaching Mandombe have much more to do with the performative celebration of a cultural identity than with literacy.
In fact, there is much more to Mandombe than its use as a writing system. Sarró focuses his book on Mandombe art, only hinting at its cosmological interpretations. The geometric properties of Mandombe are succinctly described and, while Sarró echoes Wabeladio’s claim that they constitute a major discovery, he does not dwell much on them. The system rests on standard geometric operations, also present in other writing systems and decorative art. Mandombe exploits these operations at an unprecedented level of systematicity. Although other scripts also make extensive use of rotation or mirror inversion (e.g. Evans’s script for Cree), Mandombe turns these geometric operations into art forms.
Overall, this thoughtful book is a worthy addition to the literature on the origins of writing systems, and a moving tribute to a highly original mind.
