Bété syllabary

3 million Bété people live in the Côte d'Ivoire, and their language is not taught in schools.

While working as a civil servant, he completed hundreds of small sketches, drawing from local folklore and also his own visions.

[5] He ceased his work as a civil servant in 1948, due to a vision he received on March 11 of that year, to dedicate himself to art entirely.

Art critic Yacouba Konate mentions that after the vision he had received, he realised that he needed to develop an African writing system to work in.

His major encyclopedic work, for which he called himself “Cheik Nadro”, meaning “the one who never forgets,"[5] is composed of 400 small pictures drawn with ballpoint pens and crayons.

His artwork, however, has received general praise along these lines; Schuster described it as presenting the universal nature of being human.

Debbie Anderson from the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley has provided working documents that may lead to a preliminary proposal for Bouabré's Bété syllabary in the Unicode.