Script as divine revelation: Mandombe is a script invented in 1978 in the DR Congo by David Wabeladio Payi, who claimed it was revealed to him in a dream by Simon Kimbangu, the prophet of the Kimbanguist Church, which has more than 20 million adherents in the Congo & Angola. 1/6

Mandombe is based on the sacred shapes 5 and 2, combined in various ways to form letters. It's intended primarily for writing the four national languages of the Congo: Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba and Kiswahili. This is the Mandombe version of the Lord’s Prayer in Kiswahili. 2/6

The Mandombe script is taught in Kimbanguist church schools in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is potentially one of the most viable of recent indigenous West African scripts, behind only the Vai syllabary and the N'Ko alphabet. 3/6

In his "Histoire de la Revelation de l'Ecriture Mandombe", Wabeladio Payi recounted how the script was revealed to him in a dream where he saw two figures formed by mortar joints on his wall. The mirror figures he saw on the joints looked like the digital numbers 2 and 5. 4/6

The word “Mandombe” means “that which is Black” in the Kikongo language widely spoken in the DR Congo. The script is read from left to right, but can also be read from top to bottom. A revised proposal to include this script in the Unicode character set was submitted in 2016. 5/6

With the support of the Kimbanguist movement [The Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by His Special Envoy Simon Kimbangu], who actively teach it in their church-run schools, there is a real prospect of the Mandombe script achieving an enduring footprint in Central Africa. 6/6