Gambia

From the megalithic stone circles and the Mandinka kingdoms of the river, through the Atlantic slave trade and a narrow British enclave inside French Senegal, to independence in 1965, the Jammeh years, and a democratic transition in 2017.

The Gambia is mainland Africa's smallest country, a sliver of territory wrapped around the lower 480 kilometres of the Gambia River and almost entirely enclosed by Senegal. Long before the modern state, the river valley held the Senegambian stone circles — over a thousand laterite megaliths and burial mounds raised across more than fifteen centuries — and fell within the reach of the medieval Mali Empire, whose Mandinka traders founded small riverine kingdoms such as Niumi. From the mid-fifteenth century the river drew Portuguese, then British and French traders, and became a notorious artery of the Atlantic slave trade centred on James Island, now Kunta Kinteh Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near the village of Juffure. Britain shaped its possession into a narrow enclave following the river through a series of boundary agreements with France, governing the colony of Bathurst (now Banjul) and an inland protectorate. The Gambia became independent of the United Kingdom on 18 February 1965 under Dawda Jawara, a republic in 1970, briefly joined Senegal in the Senegambia Confederation (1982–1989), endured the 22-year authoritarian rule of Yahya Jammeh after his 1994 coup, and saw a peaceful transfer of power to Adama Barrow following the December 2016 election, secured with ECOWAS backing in January 2017.