West African Empires
There are signs that among the first people to settle in The Gambia were the Jola. The banks of The River Gambia have been inhabited continuously for many thousands of years. There are indeed pottery fragments that have been found and have been dated to about 5,500 year old. There is some historical evidence that some of the ancient peoples of Europe were in continuous contact with the West Africa region.
The first known written record about The Gambia is a notation in the writings of Hanno, the Carthaginian, of his voyage down the west coast of Africa in about BC 470. These links came to an end with the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise and the subsequent expansion of Islam from North Africa.
As far back as AD 500, towns and villages based on agriculture and the knowledge of iron were scattered across West Africa. Into first millennium, trade and commercial activities increased substantially between the areas north and south of the Sahara. It is assumed that between the 5th and 8th centuries most of the Senegambian area was populated by the tribe of the Serahule, and their descendants represent about 9% of today's Gambian population.
In the 14th century, the (Manding) Mali Empire of Mali - established by Mandinka, Sundiata Keita, leader of the Malinké people - encompassed the areas from the edge of the Sahara to the forests of the south in what is now Liberia & Sierra Leone. From East to West, it covered all the regions between Takedda beyond the Niger Buckle covering Senegambia on the Atlantic Ocean. This vast empire controlled nearly all the trans-Saharan trade, and contact with the rulers of the Arab states to the north led the Mali rulers to embrace Islam with great enthusiasm.
Not surprisingly, the first records of The Gambia come from trade records. The Senegambia region first entered the trade world during the reign of Mali Empire in the mid thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries. This empire stretched westward from Mali through northern Guinea and central Senegal. The Mali Empire is best known for the time during the reign of Mansa Musa I. Such was the empire’s wealth that, upon arriving in Cairo during Musa I’s pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324-25, the market value of gold fell by twelve percent. Shortly after the end of Musa I’s reign, the empire went into a decline.
Though the rise of the Mali empire was swift its decline was slow. By the beginning of the 15th century, the empire had lost its hegemony over the affairs of the Western Sudan and had been reduced into the small area of Kangaba, where it had first originated. By the middle of the 15th century a group of Mandingos drifted into the area of the Gambia River basin and with them came Islam.
The Mandingans possess a rich treasure of national myths, tales, and songs, and as musicians they take the first rank among the people of West Africa, possessing not only several kinds of drums and iron cymbals, but also the fiddle, guitar, and lyre. It was amongst the pagan Mandingans of the Gambia that the English first met the so-called Mombo-Jombo, or village executioners, who were armed with tremendous powers to overawe and punish all violators of the “custom.” By the end of the 19th Centuery they were little more than clowns, the laughing-stock of the children.
The Mandingans, who were broken up into many rival petty states, were excellent husbandmen, but displayed their remarkable talents chiefly as traders. They have been compared to the Sarakolés, “the Jews of West Africa,” but, unlike them, were chiefly wholesale dealers, carrying on a large caravan trade between Sierra-Leone and Timbuktu, and extending their expeditions from the Senegal to the lower Niger. Throughout West Africa they were also the chief preachers of Islam, and also command widespread influence as the disseminators of news and the champions of the new ideas, reporting to their brethren in the interior all the strange sights and the marvels of industry which they have witnessed among the Europeans of the seaboard.
Religious disputes arose between the Islamic traders and animist gold miners and farmers. The empire fell when Songhai peoples withdrew their allegiance. These traders were the key to communication through the Niger bend and middle Niger River areas. Sonni Ali claimed the throne of the new Songhai Empire in 1464. Gaining strength around its capital city of Gao, the Songhai Empire expanded its reign beyond the borders of the Mali Empire through brutal conquests into northern Guinea-Bissau, Benin and Nigeria and into western Niger.
Animists had given full support to this new empire that also controlled the trade routes and major cities. The Songhai Empire at its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had surpassed the wealth of the Mali Empire. Askia Muhammed came to rule at the turn of the century. He revived Islam in the realm, causing tensions with the traditional animists to escalate again.
This left the Songhai open and vulnerable when Moorish leaders sent forces on a cross-Saharan march to invade Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné. In 1591, the cities and empire fell to Moroccan rule. Morocco’s rule lasted only 20 years, and the empire fell to smaller kingdoms.
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