Bassa Vah or Vah (word meaning throwing sign in Bassa) is a script with few samples and a complex history. The man credited with introducing Bassa Vah to academia was Thomas Flo Narven (Narvin in some spellings) Lewis. Lewis was a Bassa born and raised in Liberia. Different accounts claim that he either invented the script himself by drawing inspiration from scripts used by descendants of enslaved Bassa persons or that he was completely unaware of the script before he travelled to the United States for medical training. Accounts claim that during his medical training, Lewis came into contact with other Bassa, who taught him their script. The script was said to have been used during the Atlantic Slave Trade to help enslaved persons communicate with one another.
The Liberian government once made an effort to reintegrate Bassa Vah into
Many of the sources I was able to find available publicly regarding Bassa Vah are either linked to the Christian Education Foundation of Liberia. They provided links to linguistic studies from a native Bassa speaker and linguistic studies by Jana S. Bertkau from 1975 and 1976. The main academic source I was able to find on this topic was a Howard University PhD dissertation by Melvin Kadiri Barrolle, titled (Re)Writing Africa: Thomas Narven Lewis and the Politics of Indigenous Language in Liberia, 1870-1933, who studied Thomas Narven Lewis's papers stored at Howard University as a primary source.