The history of Senegal

Senegal lies at the western tip of Africa, where the Sahel meets the Atlantic between the Senegal and Casamance rivers. Its medieval history begins with Takrur, one of the first states south of the Sahara to adopt Islam, and continues through the Jolof Empire and the Wolof and Serer kingdoms that succeeded it. From the fifteenth century European traders, first Portuguese and later Dutch, English and French, built posts on the coast, and the island of Gorée and the town of Saint-Louis became centres of the Atlantic slave trade and of French expansion. France conquered the interior in the nineteenth century and made Dakar the capital of its West African federation. Independent since 1960, Senegal is known for an unbroken record of civilian government and, since 2000, of transfers of power through the ballot box.

Stone tools from the Falémé valley in the south-east and from the Cap-Vert peninsula show that people lived in the region in the Early Stone Age, and Neolithic sites are found along the coast near Dakar and inland. In the Saloum Delta, communities who lived off shellfish piled up hundreds of shell middens over many centuries, and from around 400 BCE began to bury their dead in mounds raised on them. The delta's archaeology is now protected as a World Heritage Site.

Further east, across the Gambia valley and into modern Senegal, stand the Senegambian stone circles, one of the largest concentrations of megaliths in the world. Rings of carefully dressed laterite pillars mark burial sites raised over a long span, from roughly the third century BCE to the sixteenth century CE. Sine Ngayène, with fifty-two circles, and Wanar are the main Senegalese groups. The people who built them are not known for certain, but they belonged to farming societies that worked iron and traded across the region. The ancestors of today's Serer, Wolof, Fula and Mandinka peoples were settled in Senegambia long before written records begin.

The first state on Senegalese soil known from written sources is Takrur, which grew up on the fertile floodplain of the middle Senegal River, an area later called Futa Toro. Arabic geographers knew it from at least the ninth or tenth century as a trading kingdom on the western edge of the Ghana Empire, exporting gold and grain and buying salt, horses and cloth from Saharan merchants. Its early rulers came from local dynasties, and a Soninke-linked dynasty probably ruled by the tenth century.

Takrur's place in history rests on its early conversion to Islam. Around 1035 its king, War Jabi, accepted the faith, imposed Islamic law and fought neighbouring non-Muslim peoples; he was among the first rulers south of the Sahara to do so. His son Lebi allied with the Almoravids, the Berber reform movement that emerged in the western Sahara in the 1040s, and Takruri troops fought alongside them in their wars in the desert. The spread of Islam on the river also pushed some non-Muslim Serer communities south towards the Sine and Saloum, according to their traditions. So closely was Takrur tied to Islam that Arabs in later centuries used "Takruri" for West African Muslims in general.

Takrur's independence ended in the thirteenth century, when the Mali Empire of Sundiata Keita and his successors extended its power to the Atlantic. Around 1286 Mali took the Senegal valley and governed it through appointed officials, and Mali's influence reached across eastern Senegal and down into Casamance, where the Mandinka kingdom of Kaabu, unified in the thirteenth century, became a powerful regional state of its own.

As Mali's grip loosened in the fourteenth century, the Wolof created their own empire. Tradition credits its foundation, around 1360, to Ndiadiane Ndiaye, a semi-legendary figure who appeared from the Senegal River and was chosen to settle a dispute among quarrelling chiefs. Whether he was a real person or a founding myth, the state that took shape around the inland province of Jolof became the dominant power in the region. Its ruler, the buurba, stood at the head of a confederation of tributary kingdoms: Waalo on the lower Senegal, Kayor along the coast, Baol, and the Serer kingdoms of Sine and Saloum. For much of its early life Jolof itself acknowledged the overlordship of Mali.

Jolof society was hierarchical, with a royal and noble class, free farmers, hereditary groups of specialists such as smiths, leatherworkers and the griots who preserved genealogies and history, and slaves. Islam spread at the courts and among traders, while older religious practices remained strong. By the mid-fifteenth century the buurbas had extended their authority over parts of Takrur, and Portuguese visitors described an army of many thousands of infantry and a large cavalry. Horses, bought from Saharan and later Portuguese traders, were the key to power in the savanna.

The arrival of European ships on the coast in the 1440s began to change the balance. Trade at the coast, especially in horses and slaves, enriched the coastal kingdoms more than inland Jolof. Succession disputes weakened the centre: in 1489 the buurba Birayma Kuran Kan was murdered, and a claimant called Jelen fled to Portugal, where he was baptised before a failed Portuguese expedition to restore him. In the early sixteenth century the Fula leader Koli Tenguella seized Futa Toro, and Sine and Saloum broke away. In 1549 Amari Ngoone Sobel Fall of Kayor defeated and killed the buurba at the Battle of Danki and declared Kayor independent. Waalo and Baol soon followed, leaving Jolof a landlocked kingdom.

From the late sixteenth century the region was divided among several kingdoms of similar weight. Kayor, ruled by a damel, and Baol, ruled by a teigne, were often united under one ruler; Waalo was governed by the brak; Sine and Saloum kept their Serer monarchies. On the river, Koli Tenguella's Denianke dynasty ruled Futa Toro for more than two centuries. These states fought one another frequently, and their warrior elites, the ceddo, grew rich from raiding and from selling captives to European traders.

Growing resentment of the ceddo and of the slave trade fed a wave of Islamic reform. In the 1670s a marabout movement known as the War of Toubenan swept through the Wolof states before it was crushed. A century later, in 1776, Muslim clerics in Futa Toro overthrew the Denianke and founded an imamate ruled by elected religious leaders, the first of them Abdul Kader Kane, who banned the sale of Muslims to Europeans. This tradition of militant Islamic reform would shape resistance to French rule in the nineteenth century.

The Portuguese navigator Dinis Dias reached Cap-Vert in 1444, and the Portuguese Empire built a chapel on the sheltered island of Gorée in 1481 and later founded Ziguinchor on the Casamance in 1645. Portuguese and Luso-African traders settled along the coast and rivers, as they did in neighbouring Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia. In the seventeenth century northern Europeans moved in. The Dutch West India Company of the Dutch Republic took Gorée in 1627, and the island changed hands repeatedly before France captured it on 1 November 1677. The French had founded Saint-Louis on an island at the mouth of the Senegal River in 1659, and it became the base for chartered companies trading upriver for gum arabic, gold, hides and slaves.

Senegambia was one of the earliest source regions of the Atlantic slave trade. Captives taken in wars and raids were sold through Saint-Louis, Gorée and the Gambia River to ships bound for the Americas. Gorée's House of Slaves, built in the late eighteenth century, has become a world symbol of the trade and is visited by many thousands each year; historians debate how many captives actually passed through the island compared with other ports, but the suffering the trade caused in the region is not in doubt. Britain and the Kingdom of France fought over the posts throughout the eighteenth century. The British held Saint-Louis from 1758 to 1779 and again from 1809 to 1816, and the 1763 Treaty of Paris briefly gave them the river, before the 1783 Treaty of Versailles returned Senegal to France.

The towns developed a distinctive society. Métis families of mixed European and African descent and the signares, African and Eurafrican women merchants who controlled much of the trade and property, dominated Saint-Louis and Gorée. Slavery was abolished during the French Revolution in 1794, restored by Napoleon in 1802, and finally abolished by France in 1848. That year the free inhabitants of the coastal towns were also granted French citizenship and the right to elect a deputy to Paris.

French expansion into the interior began in earnest under Louis Faidherbe, governor from 1854 to 1865. He conquered Waalo in 1855, built forts along the Senegal River and checked the advance of the Tukulor leader El Hadj Umar Tall, whose Tijaniyya jihad created a vast state further east in present-day Mali; French forces held out against his siege of Médine in 1857. In 1857 the French also founded Dakar on the Cap-Vert peninsula opposite Gorée. In Sine, the Serer king fought the French at Logandème in 1859, and the reformer Maba Diakhou Bâ led a jihad from Saloum until he was killed fighting Sine at Fandane-Thiouthioune in 1867.

The most famous resistance leader was Lat Dior, damel of Kayor. Placed on the throne in 1862 and driven out in 1864, he fought alongside Maba, returned to power with French recognition in 1870 and then broke with France over the Dakar–Saint-Louis railway, which he saw as the end of Kayor's independence. The line opened in 1885, and in 1886 Lat Dior was killed in battle at Dekhlé. Alboury Ndiaye, the last buurba of Jolof, resisted until 1890 and then went into exile. By the early twentieth century, during the Scramble for Africa, the whole of Senegal was under French rule; Portugal handed Ziguinchor to France in 1888, and resistance in Casamance continued for decades.

Defeat on the battlefield turned many Senegalese towards the Sufi brotherhoods. Amadou Bamba, born in Baol in 1853, founded the Mouride order and in 1887 the holy city of Touba, preaching work, prayer and peaceful spiritual struggle. The French, fearing his following, exiled him to Gabon from 1895 to 1902 and later to Mauritania. The Mourides, Tijanis and other orders became the most powerful social institutions in the country and built a peanut-growing economy in the interior.

France ruled Senegal under two systems. The Four Communes of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque and Dakar enjoyed elected councils and representation in Paris, and their residents, the originaires, had French citizenship, while the rest of the population were subjects governed by decree and forced labour. In 1895 Senegal became part of French West Africa, and in 1902 Dakar replaced Saint-Louis as the federation's capital, growing into a major port and administrative city. The peanut, grown for export and carried by railway to the ports, dominated the economy.

In 1914 Blaise Diagne, from Gorée, became the first black African elected to the French National Assembly. During World War I he secured confirmation of the originaires' citizenship in exchange for helping to recruit West African soldiers, the tirailleurs sénégalais, tens of thousands of whom served on the Western Front. In World War II Dakar sided with the Vichy regime, and in September 1940 a British and Free French expedition under Charles de Gaulle failed to take it. On 1 December 1944, at the Thiaroye camp outside Dakar, French troops opened fire on West African soldiers who had just returned from German prison camps and were protesting about unpaid wages. France long put the dead at 35; other estimates run to several hundred. In 2024 the French president formally called it a massacre.

After 1945 Senegalese politics opened up. Lamine Guèye and the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor were elected to the French parliament, and Senghor, a founder of the Négritude movement in literature and African philosophy, built his own party with the support of rural voters and the brotherhoods. Universal suffrage came in 1956. In 1958 Senegal became an autonomous republic within the French Community, and in 1959 it joined French Sudan in the Mali Federation, which became independent on 20 June 1960. The union collapsed within two months, and on 20 August 1960 Senegal went its own way, with Senghor as president and Mamadou Dia as prime minister.

The two men fell out in December 1962, when Dia was accused of attempting a coup and imprisoned. Senghor then ruled as a strong president within what was in effect a one-party system from the mid-1960s, pursuing a moderate African socialism and close ties with France, while the decolonisation of Africa and the Cold War reshaped the continent around him. From the mid-1970s he allowed a limited number of opposition parties. On 31 December 1980 Senghor stepped down voluntarily, one of the first African presidents to do so, and handed power to his prime minister, Abdou Diouf.

Diouf removed the limit on political parties and led Senegal through two decades of drought, debt and economic adjustment. In 1982 Senegal and the Gambia formed the Senegambia Confederation, which was dissolved in 1989. The same year, 1982, a separatist movement, the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance, began an insurgency in the south, which dragged on for decades with periods of ceasefire. A border dispute with Mauritania in 1989 led to violence and mass expulsions on both sides.

In 2000 the veteran opposition leader Abdoulaye Wade defeated Diouf, the first time power in Senegal passed peacefully from one party to another. Wade invested in roads and monuments but faced accusations of seeking to entrench his family, and his bid for a third term in 2012 provoked protests. He lost to his former prime minister Macky Sall, who was re-elected in 2019 after a constitutional change shortened the presidential term from seven years to five.

Sall's second term was marked by clashes with the opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, whose arrest in March 2021 set off the most serious unrest in years; dozens of people were killed in protests between 2021 and 2023. In February 2024 Sall postponed the presidential election, but the Constitutional Council ruled the delay unconstitutional. With Sonko barred from standing, his ally Bassirou Diomaye Faye was released from prison under an amnesty days before the vote and won the first round on 24 March 2024 with about 54 per cent. He took office on 2 April and appointed Sonko prime minister, and their PASTEF party won a landslide in parliamentary elections that November.

The new government asked France to withdraw its troops, and the French bases were handed over during 2025. In February 2025 a peace agreement was signed with one faction of the Casamance rebels. In May 2026, amid a debt crisis and stalled talks with the International Monetary Fund, Faye dismissed Sonko as prime minister, appointing the economist Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo, while Sonko was elected speaker of the National Assembly.