1. The Mandinka constitute one of Senegambia's major ethnic groups. Persons who identify themselves as Mandinka occupy a contiguous band of territory that cuts a swath across southern Senegambia, considerably broader in Senegal's interior and narrowing almost to a point at the north bank of the Gambia River. In the east the Mandinka belt melds with the much larger Manding-speaking realm of the Western Sudan.

2. Although thorough discussion of the historiography of the western migrations of the Mandinka is beyond the scope of this paper, brief examination of some of the relevant works from the past century or more can show how widely accepted is the idea of eastern origins for the present Mandinka population in Senegambia. Nineteenth-century books that contain mention of Mandinka migrations into Senegambia include a traveler's account, Golberry, S.M.X., Fragmens d'un voyage en Afrique fait pendant les anées 1785, 1786, et 1787 (2 vols.: Paris, 1802)Google Scholar; and two, more formal studies, Bertrand-Bocandé, M., “Notes sur la Guinée portugaise ou Sénégambie meridionale,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 3/11 (1849), 265–350, 3/12 (1849), 57-93Google Scholar; and Bérenger-Féraud, L.J.B., Les peuplades de la Sénégambie: histoire, ethnographie, moeurs et coutumes, etc. (Paris, 1879).Google ScholarDelafosse's, Maurice important study, Haut-Sénégal-Niger (3 vols.: Paris, 1912)Google Scholar, contains information on two western migrants, Amary Sonko and Sané Nianga Taraoré, the latter of whom led migrants to Niani-Wuli in the valley of the Gambia.

Through the middle years of colonial rule various European officials collected data from Mandinka informants and wrote of the migrations. See, for example, Lorimer, George, “Report on the History and Previous Native Administration of Niumiside,” Gambia Public Record Office, Banjul, 2/2390, 1942.Google Scholar The importance of such reports of colonial agents, looking for the true “native rulers” for schemes of indirect rule, is often underestimated when considering dissemination of information on ethnic origins.

Several works in Portuguese from the middle of this century deal with the migrations. See Carreira, António, Mandingas da Guiné Portuguesa (Bissau, 1947)Google Scholar; Caroco, Jorge V., Monjur--O Gabu e a sua história (Bissau, 1948)Google Scholar; and da Mota, A. Teixeira, Guiné Portuguesa (2 vols.: Lisbon, 1954).Google ScholarPélissier, Paul, Les paysans du Sénégal: Les civilisations agraires du Cayor á la Casamance (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar probably contains more information on specific populations and their migrant origins than any other book dealing with Senegambia. Other recent studies noting the migrations as the source of today's Senegambian Mandinka are Rodney, Walter, History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Quinn, Charlotte A., Mandingo Kingdoms of the Senegambia: Traditionalism, Islam, and European Expansion (Evanston, 1972)Google Scholar; and Curtin, Philip D., Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975).Google Scholar

Histories of The Gambia by Gray, J.M., A History of the Gambia (Cambridge, 1940)Google Scholar; Southorn, Lady, The Gambia: The Story of the Groundnut Colony (London, 1952)Google Scholar; and Gailey, Harry, A History of the Gambia (London, 1964)Google Scholar all contain information on the migrations, stated with different degrees of authority. (Southorn, for instance, writes, “The Gambia was subject to many invasions of tribes from the East. Each invader staked out a petty kingdom for himself. Of these invaders the Mandingos obtained the chief hold” [38]).

Finally, several textbooks in English and French have spread ideas of the migrations to students on various levels at different times. See Hamlyn, W.T., A Short History of the Gambia (Bathurst, 1931)Google Scholar, a book used through many reprintings in Gambian schools; Mahoney, Florence O. and Idowu, H.O., “The Peoples of Senegambia” in A Thousand Years of West African History, revised edition, edited by Ajayi, J.F.A. and Espie, Ian (Ibadan, 1969), 132–48Google Scholar; and Cissoko, Sékéne-Mody, Histoire de l'afrique occidentale: moyen-âge et temps moderne, vii^e siécle-1850 (Paris, 1966).Google Scholar Cissoko details just which areas different migrants conquered: Gambia, upper Casamance, and perhaps even Djolof for Tiramakan Traore; Bafing-Bondou for Amari Sonko.

3. In no way do I wish to demean the value of the International Conference on the Oral Traditions of Kaabu. In fact, it was one of the best conferences I have attended and I am grateful to the Léopold Senghor Foundation for making possible my attendance. Many of the ideas for this paper germinated in discussions I had with Joye B. Hawkins, Winifred Galloway, Samba Ka, Bakary Sidlbe, and others there. Conference papers containing information on Mandinka westward migrations include Ralphina Phillott Almeida, “An Outline History of Pachesi” Nantenin Camara and Sanoussi Zainoul, “Origine et migrations des peoples du Gabu”; Sékéne-Mody Cissoko, “Introduction à l'histoire des Mandingues de l'ouest: l'empire de Kabou (xvi-xix^e siècles)”; Winifred F. Galloway, “A Listing of Some Kaabu States and Associated Areas”; Henri Gravand, “Le Gabou dans les traditions orales Serrer”; and B.K. Sidibe, “Tiraamakang: Background to the Migrations from Manding to Kaabu.”

4. Wright, Donald R., The Early History of Niumi: Settlement and Foundation of a Mandinka State on the Gambia River (Athens, Ohio, 1977), chapters 1 and 2.Google Scholar

5. Galloway, “A Listing of Some Kaabu States,” provides brief summaries of major traditions of origin of all the Senegambian Mandinka states.

6. The Tiramakan story is the most popular tradition of origin of peoples living in the western Mandinka region. Stories of Tiramakan “going west” are told also in Mali and eastern Guinea. For a translated transcription of a narration of the story of Tiramakan's migration westward see Sidibe, “Tiraamakang.”

7. A more complete discussion of the Sora Musa legend is found in my Early History of Niumi, 41ff.

8. Versions of the Amori Sonko story are found in Golberry, , Fragmens, II, 118–20, 159ffGoogle Scholar; Thomas Brown to the Administrator, Bathurst, September 27, 1871, Gambia Public Record Office 1/29; and Hamlyn, , Short History, 49.Google Scholar

9. For this Darbo tradition of origin see Wright, Donald R., Oral Traditions from The Gambia (2 vols.: Athens, Ohio, 1979–1980), 2: 25–31.Google Scholar

10. Individuals other than Mandinka recite Mandinka traditions of origin. The guelowar, a former socio-political elite among the Serer of west-central Senegal, claim Mandinka origins. Their traditions of origin contain fairly elaborate tales of Mandinka migrations from Mali to Kaabu and thence to the Serer regions. See Gravand, “Le Gabou” Abdoulaye S. Diop, “L'impact de la civilisation mandingue au Senegal: la genèse de la royauté Guelowar au Siin et au Saloum,” Paper presented at the Conference on Manding Studies, London, 1972; and M'Baye Gueye, “Les Mandingues et le Sine,” Paper presented at the Conference on Manding Studies.

11. Miller, Joseph C., ed., The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Hamden, CT, 1980)Google Scholar contains several examples of such studies. See, for example, chapters by Richard Sigwalt, John Yoder, and David Cohen. Other relevant discussions are to be found in Beidelman, T.O., “Myth, Legend, and Oral History: A Kaguru Traditional Text,” Anthropos, 65 (1970), 74–97Google Scholar; Vansina, Jan, “Traditions of Genesis,” JAH, 15 (1974), 318–20Google Scholar; MacGaffey, Wyatt, “African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives,” HA, 5 (1978), 101–19Google Scholar; Harms, Robert, “Oral Tradition and Ethnicity,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10 (1979), 61–85Google Scholar; and Henige, David, Oral Historiography (London, 1982), 90–96.Google Scholar

12. Miller, , “Listening for the African Past” in The African Past Speaks, 32.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 16.

14. Kathryn Green believes she can identify the “birth and ‘death’” of certain ethnic groups in northern Ivory Coast. Green, personal communication, 19 August 1984. See also Green, “Sonangui and Dyula in Kong (Ivory Coast),” paper presented at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Bloomington, Indiana, October 1981. Martin Ford, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at SUNY-Bingham-ton, left in early October 1984 for fieldwork in north-eastern Liberia. Intent upon examining cultural assimilation among a small Mandingo group, Ford believes he has identified “an ethnic group in the making.” Ford, personal communication, 30 July 1984.

15. Bertrand-Bocandé, , “Notes,” 324–25.Google Scholar

16. B.K. Sidibe, “The Nyanchos of Kaabu,” unpublished paper, n.d., 8.

17. The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents, ed. Crone, G.R. (London, 1937), 67, 92, 95Google Scholar; Pereira, Duarte Pacheco, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis (London, 1937), 88Google Scholar; Description de la côte occidentale d'Afrique…par Valentim Fernandes (1506-1510), ed. Monod, Théodoreet al. (Bissau, 1951), 37.Google Scholar

18. Wright, Donald R., “Niumi: The History of a Western Mandinka State Through the Eighteenth Century,” (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1976), 87 and n26.Google Scholar

19. Robert Harms identifies a process very much like the simple one I construct here in River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (New Haven, 1981), 8–12, 125ff.Google Scholar Harms includes related information in his “Oral Tradition and Ethnicity,” and in “Bobangi Oral Traditions: Indicators of Changing Perceptions” in The African Past Speaks, 178-200.

20. Durand, J.B.L., A Voyage to Senegal (London, 1806), 38–39.Google Scholar

21. One is easily reminded here of the pockets of unassimilated San, living among the culturally-dominant Sotho in hilly regions of Basutoland in the nineteenth century. Because of their hunting-gathering mode of subsistence, the San in Basutoland were no doubt more easily identified than were the culturally-similar practitioners of horticulture living among the Gambian Mandinka.

22. See Galloway, , “Listing,” 29–30, 37–41Google Scholaret passim; Almeida, “History of Pachesi.”

23. The more thoroughly one gets to know the oral traditions of a specific lineage, the more one is apt to become familiar with the less formal--and less organized and stylized--traditions that hint at historical process. It is not coin-cidence, I believe, that I knew Jammeh oral history better than I did that of any other lineage and that I also came to know the body of less-formal Jammeh traditions. A more thorough explanation of what I consider to have been the process by which the Jammeh came to be rulers of the Gambian states of Baddibu and Niumi is found in my Early History of Niumi, 41ff.

24. At this point it seems necessary to make a disclaimer. Ethnicity is a concept I am uncomfortable applying to residents of Senegambia of a century of more ago. As we know of it, ethnicity, in terms of the Mandinka, Wolof, Fulbe (or Fula), Jola, and Serer of Senegambia, may be a concept imposed on local residents by European colonial officials as they sought to count people and to put them into various categories during the early stages of colonial rule. I suspect that the sense of identity of most Senegambians of the mid-nineteenth century was tied much more to local levels than it is today. A Senegambian may have thought of himself as a member of an extended family, a lineage, a village, or even at the extreme a widely-dispersed clan, but his concept of identity, based more on kinship structures that probably crossed linguistic lines than on a sense of being part of an ethnic group, may not have extended in practical terms far beyond the village level. It is difficult to reconstruct a Senegambian sense of ethnicity or identity of more than a century ago, but if even part of the comments in this note are valid, then it may be inappropriate to try to reconstruct such a sense for Senegambians of the past.

25. Small movements of people such as these have been going on in Senegambia throughout the ages. There is still a considerable amount of population movement with permanent or semi-permanent settlement. Certainly the nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon of “strange farming,” the movement of individuals from their homes to good farming areas to make one or more cash crops, is an example of such movement. Making possible small-scale, even individual migration through Senegambia and beyond is the so-called landlord-stranger relationship, the institutionalized hospitality that enables strangers to reside in communities for varying lengths of time with the possibility of ultimate assimilation and permanent settlement. An excellent article on this type of relationship in Sierra Leone, which is similar to the practice in Senegambia, is Dorjahn, V.R. and Fyfe, Christopher, “Landlord and Stranger: Change in Tenancy Relations in Sierra Leone,” JAH, 3 (1962), 391–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. There is reason to suspect that long-distance traders, or a combination of traders and artisans, had a particularly important role in the process of cultural transferral. In brief, there may have been a drawn-out process that involved the movement of small groups of merchants, or merchants and artisans to new areas where they lived among local populations as welcomed “strangers.” Once settled they may have prospered beyond the norm and become the sorts of individuals to whom local residents wanted to gain connection through marriage ties or relationships of clientage. Over the years these prosperous merchant families, growing in size as they assimilated indigenous people into their own cultural and linguistic practices, could have served as the focii of cultural transferral in regions of Senegambia. Jan Vansina wonders if such a process would be at the heart of much of the Bantu “expansion” in his “Bantu in the Crystal Ball, II,” HA, 7 (1980), 312ff.Google Scholar

27. Spear, Thomas makes this point in “Oral Traditions: Whose History?” HA, 8 (1981), 165–81.Google Scholar

28. Descendants of the ruling families of the traditional Mandinka states of the upper Gambia--Wuli, Kantora, Jimara, and Nyani--claim their original migrant ancestors came directly from Mali. See Galloway, “A Listing.”

29. In spite of claims to the contrary, I believe it is difficult to determine when the Kaabu Empire grew to a position of strength in the Gambia-Casamance-Gega River areas. The most recent and most thorough study of Kaabu is Mané, Mamadou, “Contribution à l'histoire du Kaabu des origines au XIX^e siècle,” Bulletin de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Serles B, 40 (1978), 88–159.Google Scholar B.K. Sidibe's three-part study of Kaabu, presented at the 1972 Manding Conference in London, Is based almost solely on oral data. The three papers bear the titles, “The Story of Kaabu: Its Extent;” “The Story of Kaabu: The Fall of Kaabu;” and “The Story of Kaabu: Kaabu's Relationship with the Gambian States.”

30. See note 10 above.

31. In addition to the other historians, who have applied some of these ideas to the study of origins of several different African groups, David Henige has recently studied traditions of origin of several groups of American racial isolates. Examining traditions of Guineas, Melungeons, Lumbees, and Ramapo Mountain people, Henige has found little agreement between their traditions, mostly borrowed, and what can be determined of their actual origins. See his “Origin Traditions of American Racial Isolates: A Case of Something Borrowed,” Appalachian Journal, 11 (1983/1984), 200–213.Google Scholar