Continental Africa’s smallest country is a river with borders
The Gambia, Africa’s smallest mainland country, is nearly wrapped by Senegal except for an Atlantic mouth, covering about 11,300 square kilometres along both banks of the Gambia River. Farming, fishing, and tourism dominate; in 2022 some 17.2 percent lived in extreme poverty under $2.15 a day.
The 2024 census counted about 2.42 million people, up roughly 30 percent from 2013, and the capital Banjul sits on an island once called Bathurst. The name comes from the Mandinka word for the river, though some link it to a Serer calabash drum played when an elder dies. Just before independence, Dawda Jawara asked British officials to keep the article in the name, partly so no one would confuse the country with newly independent Zambia.
Arab traders wrote the first accounts of the area in the ninth and tenth centuries, when gold, ivory and captives moved north across the Sahara. By the early 1300s most of the territory lay within the Mali Empire. In 1588 a Portuguese throne claimant sold river trading rights to English merchants, and between 1651 and 1661 the Duchy of Courland, in today's Latvia, held St. Andrew's Island and the site of Banjul. Britain won the river at Versailles in 1783, although France kept a tiny post at Albreda until 1856.
The Royal Navy freed people from captured slave ships on MacCarthy Island upriver, and Bathurst began as a military post in 1816. A separate colony from 1888, the Gambia had its borders fixed by an Anglo-French agreement in 1889 and abolished slavery in 1906. Independence came on 18 February 1965, and a republic followed in 1970.
While Jawara attended the 1981 royal wedding in London, leftist rebels attempted a coup; some 2,700 Senegalese troops crushed it, and between 500 and 800 people died. The resulting Senegambia Confederation lasted until 1989. Yahya Jammeh, only 29, took power in 1994 and later added Islamic to the official name, which Adama Barrow reversed after his 2017 swearing-in at the Gambian embassy in Dakar.
Source: The Gambia
