The history of the Gambia

The Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa, a strip of land seldom more than 50 kilometres wide that follows the Gambia River for some 300 kilometres inland and is surrounded on three sides by Senegal. Its shape is a product of history: for centuries the river was a highway for traders in gold, salt, cloth and enslaved people, and the European powers that fought over it ended up drawing a colony around the water itself. Before the Europeans came, the valley held stone-circle builders, Mandinka kingdoms tied to the Mali Empire and Wolof and Fula states to the north and east. Independent since 1965, the country lived through three decades of civilian rule, twenty-two years of authoritarian government under Yahya Jammeh, and a democratic transition since 2017.

The earliest inhabitants of the Gambia valley left no written trace and their languages are unknown, but they left monuments. By around 2000 BCE coastal peoples were gathering shellfish in such quantities that their refuse built up into great mounds, or middens, along the coast from the Casamance to the Senegal delta. Inland, farming and iron-working communities spread through the savannah during the first millennium BCE.

The most striking remains are the Senegambian stone circles, a belt of more than a thousand sites stretching across about 30,000 square kilometres of central Senegal and the north bank of the Gambia, with the Wassu and Kerr Batch groups on the Gambian side. Laterite pillars, cut with iron tools and often around two metres tall and several tonnes in weight, were set in rings around burials. The tradition seems to have run from about the 3rd century BCE to the 16th century CE, and burial mounds near Wassu have been dated to between the 10th and 14th centuries. Building them required organised labour and a society able to support it. Who the builders were remains disputed: some scholars point to the ancestors of the Serer, who still use similar funerary houses, others to a Mande-speaking people the Serer remember as the Soos, and others to peoples later pushed south, such as the Bassari. The circles were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.

From the 9th and 10th centuries Arab geographers wrote of the lands of the western Sahel, and Muslim merchants carried the region's gold, ivory and captives north across the Sahara along routes that had grown up under the Ghana Empire. The Gambia lay at the far western end of this network, and Islam arrived slowly with traders and clerics.

In the 13th century the valley was drawn into the orbit of Mali, founded by Sundiata Keita after his victory over the Sosso. Oral tradition tells that Sundiata's general Tiramakhan Traore marched west to avenge an insult from the king of Jolof, defeated him on the north bank and then crossed the river, founding towns and settling his followers among the Bainuk and other earlier peoples. Some historians think this story compresses a slower process in which Mandinka culture and language spread under Mali's influence. Either way, a string of small Mandinka kingdoms took shape along the river, among them Niumi near the mouth, Baddibu, Niani and Wuli upstream, and Kombo on the south bank, while further south the Mandinka province of Kaabu grew into a power of its own in what is now Guinea-Bissau. These states were ruled by mansas and warrior elites, with Muslim scholars and merchants, the Jahanke and Dyula, running much of the long-distance trade. Mandinka became the language of commerce.

In the 1360s a Wolof ruler, Ndiadiane Ndiaye, broke away from Mali to found the Jolof Empire in what is now northern Senegal, and Jolof extended its influence over the north-bank kingdoms for a time. Around 1490 a Fula warlord, Koli Tenguella, attacked Wuli and Niani from the Futa Jallon highlands, threatening Mali's hold on the gold of Bambuk. After the Songhai Empire killed Koli's father in 1512 and Jolof broke apart after the battle of Danki in 1549, Mali briefly restored its dominance in southern Senegambia. But when Morocco destroyed Songhai in 1591 the whole regional order shifted, and after a disastrous Malian defeat near Djenné in 1599 the Gambian kingdoms were left to go their own way.

Portuguese caravels began raiding the West African coast for captives in the 1440s. A raiding party that may have entered the Gambia in 1446 was ambushed by canoes from Niumi and killed with poisoned arrows. In 1455 the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto, sailing for Henry the Navigator of Portugal, reached the river mouth and was driven back by war canoes whose crews, he learned, believed the newcomers were cannibals. The following year the Portuguese switched from raiding to trade, and Diogo Gomes sailed some 400 kilometres upriver to the gold market of Cantor.

Over the next two centuries small numbers of Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese traders, the lançados, settled along the river, married into local families and acted as middlemen. European horses, iron and later firearms shifted the balance of power between African states, rewarding rulers who controlled access to the river. The Gambia also became one of the earliest sources of captives for the Atlantic slave trade. The kingdoms of the valley sold prisoners of war and people seized in raids, and the river carried them to the coast for shipment to Cape Verde, Iberia and later the Americas.

From the late 16th century the Portuguese Empire lost its grip on the trade. English merchants, licensed under letters patent first confirmed by Elizabeth I, sent expeditions in the early 17th century, including Richard Jobson's voyage of 1620 to 1621, but losses deterred them. In 1651 Jacob Kettler, Duke of Courland, a small Baltic duchy in what is now Latvia, obtained St Andrew's Island and land on the north bank from local rulers and built a fort, hoping to supply his colony on Tobago. When the duke was captured during a war with Sweden, his outpost passed briefly to the Dutch West India Company of the Dutch Republic before Courlanders returned.

In 1661 an English expedition under Robert Holmes, sent by the Royal Adventurers into Africa, forced the seven-man Courlander garrison to surrender and renamed the island James Fort after the Duke of York. The Royal African Company later took it over, and James Island became a busy base for buying gold, ivory, beeswax and, above all, enslaved people. Its ruins, with related sites at Albreda, Juffure and the river mouth, are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1677 France captured Gorée, and from 1681 it held a trading post at Albreda facing James Island. A century and a half of Anglo-French rivalry followed: the French took James Fort in 1695, 1702, 1704 and 1708, pirates seized it in 1719, and in 1779 the French captured it a fifth time and wrecked it so completely that it was never rebuilt. From 1766 to 1783 the British ruled the river as part of a short-lived Crown colony of Senegambia governed from Saint-Louis. After 1783 British activity shrank to a few private traders, whose station at Pisania supplied explorers such as Mungo Park.

Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, and the Royal Navy began intercepting slave ships off the river. After Gorée was handed back to France in 1814, Captain Alexander Grant was sent to find a new base. In 1816 he obtained St Mary's Island from the king of Kombo and founded Bathurst, the future Banjul, as a post for suppressing the trade and a settlement for merchants. MacCarthy Island far upriver became a garrison and a home for liberated Africans freed from intercepted slave ships, and further cessions, including the Ceded Mile on the north bank in 1826 and the French enclave of Albreda in 1857, slowly extended British territory. For much of the century the Gambia was governed from Freetown in Sierra Leone.

The interior meanwhile was convulsed by the Soninke-Marabout wars of the mid-19th century, in which Muslim reformers fought the older ruling dynasties of the Mandinka kingdoms, and by the rise of Fula power under Alfa Molo and his son Musa Molloh in Fuladu. As France advanced inland from Senegal under Louis Faidherbe, London repeatedly considered trading the Gambia to France for territory elsewhere, in 1866, 1870 and 1876, but merchants, missionaries and Gambians opposed the deal. During the Scramble for Africa, an Anglo-French agreement of 1889 fixed the border along the river, and Britain declared a protectorate over the interior in 1894. Bathurst and its surroundings remained a colony, and an ordinance of 1906 abolished slavery.

The Gambia was one of the poorest corners of the British Empire. Its economy rested almost entirely on groundnuts, much of the crop grown by seasonal migrant farmers from upriver and neighbouring territories, and the colonial government ran the protectorate through chiefs under a system of indirect rule. Gambian soldiers of the West African Frontier Force fought in the Kamerun campaign in the First World War and, as the Gambia Regiment, in Burma during the Second World War. Bathurst hosted RAF bases and a flying-boat station, and in 1943 Franklin D. Roosevelt stopped there on his way to Casablanca; appalled by the poverty he saw, he called the colony a hell-hole in a letter to Churchill.

Political organisation began among the educated Creole and Wolof community of Bathurst. In the 1920s and 1930s the journalist Edward Francis Small founded the Gambia section of the National Congress of British West Africa, the Bathurst Trade Union and the Ratepayers' Association. After 1945 reform quickened. A 1960 constitution created a partly elected House of Representatives, and the People's Progressive Party of Dawda Jawara, a veterinary surgeon with his base among the rural Mandinka, won the 1962 elections. Full internal self-government came in 1963, and on 18 February 1965 the Gambia became independent within the Commonwealth, with Elizabeth II as head of state. Many observers doubted that so small a state could survive on its own, and union with Senegal was widely discussed, but Gambian leaders chose separate statehood.

A first referendum on becoming a republic narrowly failed in 1965, and a second succeeded in 1970, when Jawara became president. For more than two decades the Gambia was one of the few African states to hold regular multiparty elections, although Jawara's party won all of them. The economy depended on groundnuts, re-export trade with Senegal and a growing tourist industry, while Alex Haley's 1976 book Roots and its 1977 television adaptation, the story of his ancestor Kunta Kinte, brought visitors to the village of Juffure.

In July 1981, while Jawara was in London, a group led by Kukoi Samba Sanyang attempted a coup with the help of members of the paramilitary Field Force. Senegalese troops restored the government after a week of fighting in which several hundred people died. The two countries then formed the Senegambia Confederation in 1982, with plans for joint armed forces and economic integration, but the Gambia resisted absorption and the confederation was dissolved in 1989.

On 22 July 1994 a group of young army officers led by Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh overthrew Jawara without serious bloodshed. Jammeh ruled through a military council, then won a presidential election in 1996 under a new constitution and was re-elected in 2001, 2006 and 2011 in polls the opposition considered unfair. His government built roads, schools and a university, but it became notorious for repression: journalists, opposition activists and suspected opponents were detained, tortured, disappeared or killed, many by a paramilitary unit known as the Junglers. Jammeh claimed to cure AIDS with herbal remedies, renamed James Island as Kunta Kinteh Island in 2011, took the country out of the Commonwealth in 2013 and in 2015 declared the Gambia an Islamic republic.

In December 2016 Adama Barrow, the candidate of an opposition coalition, defeated Jammeh in a presidential election. Jammeh at first accepted the result, then rejected it. Barrow was sworn in at the Gambian embassy in Dakar on 19 January 2017, and the same day troops of the Economic Community of West African States, led by Senegal and backed by a UN Security Council resolution, entered the country. Two days later Jammeh left for exile in Equatorial Guinea.

Barrow's government restored press freedom, released political prisoners and rejoined the Commonwealth in 2018. A Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission heard testimony on the abuses of the Jammeh years and recommended prosecutions. Barrow had promised to step down after three years but stayed on, formed his own party and won re-election in December 2021, a result the opposition disputed; a reported coup plot was announced in December 2022. The country's 2024 census counted about 2.4 million people, making it one of the most densely populated states in Africa. Its economy still relies on farming, fishing and tourism.