Beyond Migration and Conquest: Oral Traditions and Mandinka Ethnicity in Senegambia

Abstract

One of the most prevalent and widely-accepted themes in the history of the Mandinka of Senegambia concerns the great Mandinka migrations--the westward movement of large groups of people that included the distant ancestors of today's Senegambian Mandinka population. The migrants are supposed to have come from traditional Manding homelands east and southeast of present locations of Mandinka peoples in Senegambia; conquest and longterm settlement were the ususal results of these migrations.For over a century scholarly (and not so scholarly) works dealing with the western Mandinka have shown acceptance as fact and included discussions at varying length of the early westward migrations. At a 1980 conference in Dakar, which historians, linguists, anthropologists, traditionists, and others from four continents attended, considerable time actually went toward discussing and disputing the specific routes the major migrant leaders took and toward attempting to work out paradigms of the various “waves” of Mandinka migration. And lest I appear too smug in my implied criticism of studies of these migrations, I should admit that I, too, have written of the phenomena in ways that could be interpreted as scholarly discussion of their causes, timing, and (gulp) even their “flow.”The major reason for the widespread acceptance of early Mandinka westward migrations and subsequent conquest and settlement--aside from the present ethnic and linguistic arrangement of the western Mandinka--is, of course, the frequency with which one hears tales of such in Senegambian traditions of origin. It is a rare Gambian Mandinka oral narrative--whether focusing on the history of a state, a village, or a separate lineage--that does not begin with where the ancestors originated.