My Bringing It All Back Home Kickstarter Campaign: The Outcome

* 156 people backed a Kickstarter campaign called Bringing It Back Home in early 2026.
* The Mende Kikakui syllabary was brought home to the village of Nyandeyama.
* The plan was to carve "Write!" in ten endangered scripts and return them to their communities.
* The carving process took six months, and some carvings were sent to their natural habitats.
* The Rohingya script was developed by Maulana Mohammed Hanif in the 1980s.
* The Rohingya faced persecution from Myanmar's armed forces and police starting in 2016.
* Some 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh refugee camps, where approximately 25,000 children learn the Hanifi script in schools.
* The Ditema tsa Dinoko script is described as highly detailed with directional glyphs indicating vowel and consonant sounds, and incorporates visual elements for voicing.
* The Balinese culture respects its texts, including a holy day related to Saraswati.
* The Mende syllabary was conceived around 1917 by Mohamed Turay and developed further by Kisimi Kamara.
* Use of the Mende syllabary declined after the British introduced a Latin-based system in the 1940s.
* Konrad Tuchscherer reports interest among students learning Kikakui in Sierra Leone.
* The Mandombe script is described as having a visual template of a brick wall.
* Minim is a script designed to be written either left-to-right or right-to-left, featuring two versions of each character.

The provided text weaves together disparate threads concerning the history, status, and survival of diverse writing systems across various cultures, often intersecting these histories with themes of power, exile, and identity. A significant pattern emerges around the tension between official, dominant scripts (like Latin or Arabic) and indigenous, visually rich systems. The narrative moves from a specific act of cultural reclamation—the Mende carving project—to broader geopolitical traumas affecting minority groups, such as the Rohingya exodus, and then pivots to detailed analyses of the structure of alternative scripts like Ditema tsa Dinoko and Mandombe. This structure suggests an underlying theme: inscribed knowledge is inextricably linked to sovereignty and survival.
The relationship between script and power is a central axis. When external powers impose linguistic or religious dominance, minority groups often experience erasure; for instance, the Rohingya's statelessness resulting from Myanmar's actions contrasts sharply with the efforts of their community in Bangladesh to maintain literacy. Similarly, the suppression of the Bamum script by colonial and subsequent regimes demonstrates how controlling visual and textual tools is a mechanism of political control, even when the script itself contains profound knowledge (history, law).
The shift from history to practical revitalization—from historical documentation of scripts to active carving, teaching, and legal demands for script use (as seen in Bali's recent cultural declarations)—illustrates cognitive sovereignty as an active, embodied practice. The fact that systems like Minim intentionally offer bidirectional writing directions highlights a philosophical resistance to rigid, singular worldviews. The inherent pattern is one of marginalized groups asserting their right to define reality through the symbols they choose to embed in physical space, whether carved into wood, written on palm leaves, or set into architecture.
Bridge questions: How does the concept of "embodied knowledge," as suggested by the Ditema tsa Dinoko script’s focus on spatial sound representation, inform contemporary debates about digital literacy and cognitive freedom? What are the long-term, systemic costs when official state structures deny the existence or use of indigenous scripts outside of ceremonial contexts? How can the kinetic energy of cultural revival, demonstrated across these diverse examples, be translated into actionable strategies for resisting ongoing forms of linguistic and cultural assimilation?