His writing system, an abugida called 'Kikakui' after the first three consonant sounds, was inspired by the Arabic abjad, the Vai syllabary and certain indigenous Mende pictograms and cryptographic characters.

[1] One of Turay's Quranic students, as well as his nephew and son-in-law, was a young Kuranko man named Kisimi Kamara.

Kamara popularized the script, travelling widely in Mendeland and becoming a well-known figure, eventually establishing himself as one of the most important chiefs in southern Sierra Leone in the mid 20th century.

[3] The colonial authorities' choice in the 1930s to use Diedrich Hermann Westermann's Africa Alphabet, based on the Latin script, for writing local languages pushed Kikakui into the background.

Experience, however, proved that a syllabary such as Kikakui was better suited for teaching and learning languages such as Mende that have an 'open syllable' or consonant-vowel (CV) structure.