The Gambia is a river with a country around it. Its strange shape, a thin strip running some 300 kilometres inland and wrapped on three sides by Senegal, was drawn by Britain and France in 1889 to suit their own trade. It began with a slave fort on a rock in the river and ended, 300 years later, as one of Africa's smallest independent states.
The Gambia River was the first trade route deep into West Africa, and the small island about 30 kilometres from its mouth controlled it. Portuguese sailors reached the river in 1456. In 1651 the Duchy of Courland, in today's Latvia, built a fort on the island. The English took it in 1661 and renamed it James Island and Fort James after James, Duke of York, who also headed the Royal Adventurers trading to Africa.
From 1684 the Royal African Company ran the fort. The French captured and wrecked it several times, but it remained the English base for buying gold, ivory, beeswax and above all enslaved people. Captives from the river and the interior were held on the island before being shipped across the Atlantic.
UNESCO lists James Island together with related sites: the ruins of the Portuguese settlement of San Domingo, a Portuguese chapel, old French trading houses at Albreda, and two later British forts at the river mouth, the Six-Gun Battery (1816) and Fort Bullen (1826). Those two were built for the opposite purpose: to stop the slave trade once Britain had made it illegal.
After Britain banned its slave trade in 1807, it needed a base to watch the river. In April 1816 Captain Alexander Grant of the Royal African Corps, sent from Gorée, made a treaty with Tomani Bojang, the Mansa (king) of Kombo, to lease Banjul Island. The rent was 103 iron bars a year, worth about £25 at the time. The island was renamed St Mary's Island, and the new town was called Bathurst after Earl Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary.
Bathurst was a swampy, flood-prone, mosquito-ridden place, and many British soldiers and officials died there. Traders, freed Africans and craftsmen from Gorée and Senegal settled in the town. In 1821 Bathurst and the British posts upriver were placed under the governor of Sierra Leone. The Gambia had its own governor from 1843 to 1866, was run from Freetown again until 1888, and only then became a fully separate colony.
By the 1880s France ruled Senegal all around the river, and Britain held little more than Bathurst and a few trading posts. In the agreement of 10 August 1889, the two powers drew the line that still separates the two countries: a strip roughly ten kilometres wide on each bank, running up the river to the limit of navigation. A joint Anglo-French boundary commission then marked it on the ground in the 1890s, and local rulers whose lands it cut in two resisted.
A protectorate was proclaimed over the interior in December 1894. Like everywhere else, it was run through chiefs and paid for by a hut tax. Slavery was only abolished in the protectorate in 1906.
The result was a country that makes little sense on a map: Wolof, Mandinka, Fula, Jola and Serer peoples split between British and French rule, with the same families living on both sides of a border that was meant to follow the river trade.
The Gambia's economy rested on one crop: groundnuts (peanuts). Gambian farmers, joined every season by migrant farmers from the interior known as "strange farmers", grew them for export to Europe. The colony was so dependent on one crop that it was nicknamed "the groundnut colony". Britain spent little on it. In the 1950s and early 1960s many officials in London doubted that such a small, poor territory could ever stand alone, and some suggested merging it with Senegal.
Gambian soldiers served Britain in both world wars, including in the Burma campaign in the Second World War, and during that war Bathurst was used as an Allied air and naval base.
Politics was first dominated by the Bathurst elite. In 1959 a young vet from the protectorate, Dawda Kairaba Jawara, became leader of the party that grew into the People's Progressive Party, which spoke for the rural majority. The Gambia was granted self-government on 4 October 1963, with Jawara as Prime Minister.
After talks in London in 1964, Parliament passed the Gambia Independence Act 1964, which received royal assent on 17 December 1964. It declared that on and after 18 February 1965 the Colony and the Protectorate of the Gambia would together have fully responsible status within the Commonwealth.
The Queen stayed head of state. A first referendum on a republic failed in 1965. A second succeeded, and The Gambia became a republic on 24 April 1970, with Jawara as President. On 19 February 1973, eight years and a day after independence, Jawara renamed the capital from Bathurst to Banjul. A Gambian historian has called it an important step in decolonisation: for eight years the capital had kept a name chosen by the colonisers.
Long before the forts, the river was part of the Mali empire and later the Mandinka kingdoms of Kaabu, Niumi and Kombo. Our partner site covers The Gambia today, from the river to the coast:
The Colonial Office files on the Gambia are at The National Archives in Kew. The Gambia Independence Act 1964 can be read on legislation.gov.uk. Royal African Company records are held at Kew too.
Banjul International Airport is a short drive from the Atlantic resorts. In Banjul, see Arch 22, built after the 1994 coup, and the National Museum. Ferries cross from Banjul to Barra, near Fort Bullen; from there it is a short drive to Albreda and Juffureh, with its small museum on the slave trade. Boats go out to Kunta Kinteh Island from Albreda. Further upriver, Janjanbureh (once Georgetown, on MacCarthy Island) was a British trading post.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
In London:
The colony that ran the Gambia from Freetown for decades.
The company that ran Fort James from 1684.
The last two West African territories, and the votes that decided them.
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
Britain Adventures is an independent partner website. Our partner sites on Africa and its history are where the stories on this page continue:
Search our Network. Start here.