Obinna POV
The night had a way of pulling thoughts out of hiding.
While others slept beneath the warm hush of oil lamps and raffia mats, I sat outside my hut with a clay slate on my lap, fingers dusted in fine white chalk made from ground snail shells.
The moon loomed high as I had one word run through my mind over and over again.
Nsibidi.
I whispered the word aloud like it was sacred. Like it might open something inside me if said with the right breath.
I have come to understand that Nsibidi wasn't just a script, it was memory carved in symbols, magic disguised as culture.
I knew of it before, vaguely, back when I was still him; Chijioke from the 21st century.
A few documentaries, academic whispers, speculative reconstructions on YouTube. But it was only here, through the fragmented memories of the boy I have become and the patient lessons of Onwudiwe, that I truly felt its pulse.
They say it began among the Ekoi, far west near the Cross River, but it spread like roots into the Efik, the Ibibio, the Igbo and other ethnic groups.
Not through war or conquest, but through brotherhoods. Secret and Powerful ones.
The Ekpe society. The Mgbe. The Nimm.
They passed it down like forbidden fire.
Nsibidi was their language, yes—but also their law, their magic, their memory. A man could live an entire life and only ever be taught a dozen symbols. A higher-ranking initiate? Hundreds. Maybe more.
It wasn't phonetic. Not like the alphabet I knew. It wasn't meant to speak words but to hold ideas.
Whole concepts boiled down to symbols.
A curved line might mean love or treachery depending on how you drew it. Two dots and a spiral? That could be marriage, or murder.
Even the Nnabo cults, feared for their blood rituals and ancestral pacts, carved Nsibidi into masks and skulls. Not for art. For memory. For warning.
Sometimes, even for revenge.
But it wasn't just for war or judgment.
Lovers sent symbols wrapped in cloth.
Messages of longing, betrayal, or apology painted discreetly on calabashes.
A girl might wear a certain set of beads on market day, not because they matched her blouse, but because they meant "I watched you in the moonlight."
Nsibidi was everywhere. And yet… nowhere.
You could walk through a village and see it on every wall, every drum, every stool, but understand nothing.
Because Nsibidi is layered.
One symbol might mean "justice" to a child.
To a warrior, it means "retribution."
To a lover, it means "balance."
To a spirit medium, it means "the weighing of souls."
Knowledge of the symbols was ranked, guarded and feared.
To learn the sacred signs was to ascend. It made you dangerous. Which is why the colonial masters, in all their arrogance, tried to erase it.
Burned shrines. Executed elders. Banned the societies and labelled them as evil societies.
They thought they were killing a language.
What they didn't know was: Nsibidi isn't a language.
It is a memory.
And memories, when buried, don't die.
They ferment.
They become fuel.
And that ambiguity? That was the point.
The question that must be on your mind is: Why did they keep it secret?
And the answer is actually quite simple. Because power feared imitation.
Because not everyone should wield fire.
Because if everyone could read it, then no one could be trusted with it.
It wasn't for the marketplace. No. It was for the council hut. The shrine. The skin of the warrior before battle. The calabash sent as a warning.
A single line drawn on a tree could declare war or end one.
I remember staring at one etched on the inside of Onwudiwe's gourd. At first glance it looked like decoration. But when he saw me watching, he simply said:
"Some things are only spoken to those who know how to listen with their eyes."
Like…what the hell was that supposed to mean?
I could've voiced that question, but I knew he was trying to say something, so I held my tongue.
And in the silence now, with my memories tangled between two lives, I couldn't help but compare.
Chinese logograms—thousands of them, each with weight and shape and tone.
Japanese Kanji—borrowed and reshaped.
Egyptian hieroglyphs—stories told in animal masks and stars.
Greek symbols—π, Σ, Δ—all abstractions of the real world.
Even Nordic runes carved into swords and stone.
They all started the same way. Humans trying to make meaning permanent.
So what if Nsibidi… could evolve?
That's what kept me awake tonight.
I needed to evolve it, establish mathematical physics and chemistry formulas and then teach it to someone to complete the quest
What if Nsibidi didn't have to stay trapped behind initiation rites and shrines?
What if it could be something more. Something taught in the open? A tool of knowledge, not just mystery?
What if we could write science in it? Math? Chemistry? Everything I once knew—but in our language?
I would become the scribe of a future no one here could even imagine.
So now, I sit here, a twenty-first century soul trapped in a pre-colonial war-torn body, scribbling symbols into the sand with my finger.
My mind, filled with equations, chemical reactions, Newtonian mechanics... but I know my people don't need foreign tongues to learn these things.
They don't need Latin or Greek letters. They need our own symbols.
Nsibidi will be the key.
I will adapt it.
Reshape it.
Forge it into something new—but still ours.
My glyphs will mean motion, light, structure, growth, cause and effect.
A symbol for gravity. For combustion. For distance. For change.
A system of knowledge encoded in a script that speaks to our ancestors, not just our descendants.
But I must be careful. Too many symbols, and they'll lose meaning. Too complex, and I'll become a priest. I want to be a teacher.
I will build it slow, one symbol at a time.
Let the signs grow from the soil of our truth, not imported, not borrowed.
We will write science in the language of spirits. We will explain the universe using the ink of our people.
It was powerful precisely because not everyone could read it. That was the point.
So why change that?
Why risk stripping away the mystique?
Because some knowledge needs to be shared, not hidden.
Because fire, in the right hands, becomes light.
And because I had a vision. A memory of a classroom, of chalkboards and equations and the smell of ozone before a rain. I wanted to give that to this world, not in English, or Greek, or Latin, but in something that belonged.
So I began.
I started simple.
A single dot meant one. Two dots, two. I remembered Roman numerals, sure, but I didn't need Latin here. I needed something familiar. Something organic.
So I shaped the numerals like yam mounds—small hillocks in a line. Something even farmers would recognize.
Then came the symbols for operations.
I thought of the markets. Haggling. Cowries exchanged in tight fists. Gain and loss.
So I carved:
𖡌 – Nkanu: Gathering. Addition.
𖡍 – Nfu: Loss. Subtraction.
𖡎 – Ito: Growth. Multiplication.
𖡏 – Nkewa: Paths parting. Division.
𖡂 – Ntụnyere: Equal to, Balance, Equilibrium, or Proportional fairness
These weren't just symbols. They were stories that held context. And that made them powerful.
But math is more than counting.
What of the unknown?
What of the mysterious 'x'?
In a world that never needed it?
I remembered classroom chalkboards—those endless equations. And the teacher's voice: "Solve for the x." "Fine x."
Like…why would I even need to look for something I didn't egen…sigh. I digress.
So I carved a symbol that curled like a question mark stripped of its dot:
𖡘 – Ife Nzuzo: The Hidden Thing. The Unknown.
I drew in the sand:
𖡘 𖡎 ⵊⵊ 𖡌 ⵊⵊⵊ 𖡂 ⵊⵊⵊⵊⵊⵊⵊ
Two unknowns times two, plus three equals seven.
It worked and felt right.
Then came physics.
Speed. Velocity.
𖡑 – Ọsọ: A bent arrow. Velocity.
𖡒 – Ike Mgbakwunye: Twin-tailed arrow. Acceleration.
𖡓 – Ike: A clenched fist inside a ring. Force.
I moved to energy next.
𖡔 – Mmuo Ike: A flowing river looping a sun. Energy.
𖡕 – Ọkụ: A spiral flaring outward. Heat.
Every glyph came with memory. Every curve had breath.
Chemistry tested me.
There were no atoms in Igbo. No protons or neutrons. But there was water.
I remembered: H₂O. Two hydrogen. One oxygen.
So I assigned:
⚫ – Ume Ndụ: Small filled circle. Hydrogen.
⚪ – Ndụ Ncheta: Larger hollow ring. Oxygen.
→ – Mkpakọrịta: Reaction arrow.
A bond was a line. A union of purpose.
⚫⚫ 𖡌 ⚪ → ⚫⚪⚫
It even looked like a water molecule.
I leaned back. My fingers were kind of sore. My back ached from crouching. But my mind?
My mind blazed with ideas. My Intelligence and Wisdom stat were on full time drive.
I wasn't just writing symbols. I was laying the bones of a language. A system. A map for the future.
One day, a child in Aku will learn algebra using these signs. A warrior will measure force before swinging a hammer. A healer will balance heat and reaction.
And when they ask where it came from, they'll be told:
A mad young man wrote it in the sand beneath the moonlight.
I smiled.
Maybe madness was just the beginning of clarity. And by then..? I'll probably be a king.
Just as the thought settled,
[DING!]