Gambia

The smallest country on mainland Africa, a ribbon along a river surrounded on three sides by Senegal. Its shape records exactly how it was acquired: British traders held the navigable Gambia as a route inland from the seventeenth century, and when the Anglo-French boundary negotiations of 1889 divided the region, Britain kept the water and France took everything the water ran through. Bathurst, founded at the mouth in 1816, began as a base for suppressing the Atlantic trade that this river had long served. The colony proper and the upriver protectorate were governed separately, the latter through chiefs, and groundnuts were effectively the entire export economy. Independence came in 1965, and Britain doubted throughout that the country could stand alone. The Senegambia confederation of 1982 was an attempt at an answer and dissolved in 1989. Dawda Jawara governed until Yahya Jammeh's coup in 1994; Jammeh ruled for twenty-two years, claimed to cure AIDS with herbs, and lost the 2016 election, refused to go, and was removed by a regional force. Alex Haley traced Roots to a village here. Banjul is the capital. The country has about 2.8 million people in around eleven thousand square kilometres. Roughly a tenth of its territory is the river itself. English is official, with Mandinka and Wolof widely spoken. Bathurst was renamed Banjul in 1973. Kunta Kinteh island is a World Heritage site. The country is about four hundred kilometres long and nowhere much more than fifty wide. Tourism to its short Atlantic coast is a significant part of the economy.

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