peoples and witnessed the effects of colonization and illegal human trafficking in Africa. Understanding this existential threat, at the turn of the 20th century he embarked on a mission to modernize the Lerewa picto phonographic glyphs into a syllabary to preserve the history of the Bamum. The evolution of the glyphs went from 700 signs to 510 signs with 10 arithmetic digits and punctuation. This stage was called Lerewa. Lerewa is a logographic system of which 80% is composed pictograms representing everyday objects in nature, plants and parts of the human body and the other 20% composed of ideograms and phonograms, representing abstract ideas and sounds respectively. This early form of writing was written from left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top on clay and wooden tabs as well as animal skins using charcoal. Both hieroglyphs and Lerewa contain two basic elements picto ideograms and phonograms. Most words feature a combination of the 2 signs. The next phase of writing developed between 1899 and 1901 was called mbima which means mixture in Bamum. It included 439 characters including 10 arithmetic one punctuation, elimination of 116 signs that didn’t satisfy Njoya and the introduction of 45 characters to overcome phonetic short comings. Like Lerewa, Mbima is a logographic system where pictograms dominate over ideograms. In the beginning of 1902 the third iteration of the Bamum script Nyi Nyi Fa Fu(which means God has given grace) was created. Nyi Nyi Fa Fu is reduced by 56 characters down to 381, including 10 arithmetic digits and 2 punctuation marks. Here Ideograms are made primary over pictograms and Left to right writing was mandated, resulting in an expansion of literary activity, numerous correspondences and property transactions. In 1903 Njoya built schools to teach the writing and also began translating scriptural texts. The 4th phase of the Bamum script came in 1907 with Ri Nyi Fa Fu. This script had only 286 characters, 10 numbers and 2 punctuations with the logograms simplified. The 5th iteration of the script Ri Nyi Fu Fen began a year after the development of the last stage and represents the last logographic step of the alphabet. It contains 81 characters less with 205 symbols. This stage totally eliminated pictograms in favor of ideograms and syllables. In February of 1910 Njoya completed the process of going from a picto-syllabic system to the syllabo-graphemic system in