Gambia Colony and Protectorate

The smallest colony on the African mainland, and the strangest in shape: a ribbon of land following the Gambia River inland for some three hundred miles, nowhere much more than twenty miles wide, surrounded on three sides by French Senegal. The shape is a direct record of how it was acquired. British traders held the river as a route to the interior from the seventeenth century, and when the Anglo-French boundary negotiations of 1889 divided the region, Britain kept the navigable water and France took everything the water ran through. Bathurst, founded in 1816 at the mouth, began as a base for suppressing the Atlantic slave trade the river had long served. The colony proper - the island and the town - was governed directly, while the protectorate upriver was added in 1894 and run indirectly through chiefs, the same two-tier arrangement Britain used across West Africa. The economy was groundnuts and almost nothing else, grown along the riverbanks and shipped out through Bathurst, which left revenue hostage to a single price. Britain repeatedly doubted the place could stand alone and floated schemes to trade it to France or merge it with Senegal. Independence came on 18 February 1965 anyway, and the question of viability persisted: the Senegambia confederation of 1982 was an attempt to answer it, and dissolved in 1989. The river that made the colony worth taking still divides Senegal in two.Bathurst was renamed Banjul in 1973. The country remains the smallest on mainland Africa, and roughly a tenth of its territory is the river itself.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration