Gambia (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

The Gambian capital of Banjul was founded as part of British abolition efforts in West Africa.  A planned urban center, its earliest residents included the Aku, or Liberated Africans resettled from Sierra Leone and captured slave vessels.  The Aku identity formed over several decades in The Gambia largely through self-identification as the ‘other’ African and British subjects in the 19th century.  In the early 20th century they were the Gambian elite and became the driving force behind the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

The Gambia River was an active site of the Atlantic slave trade and British efforts to legitimize trade in the 19th century.  African peoples were brought from the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone as part of different commercial and colonial ventures while others were sent to the Americas as enslaved. Geographically part of the African Diaspora as both a site of departure and settlement, this paper explores African populations resettled along the river as slaves and liberated Africans in the 18th and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

The legacy of Roots on Gambia is the alteration of memory and history.  Haley’s tale and seemingly academic use of documentary and oral histories lent credibility to his story, resulting in the novel replacing previous collective memory of Juffure’s founding and its Atlantic past.  As a result of the rise in African Diaspora tourism in Gambia following the novel’s publication, a national identity emerged dependent on the persona of Kunta Kinte and victimization through the slave trade.  This is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Sal, Bacalhau e Açúcar : Trade, Mobility, Circular Navigation and Foodways in the Atlantic World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. At the time of Portuguese arrival on the Gambia River (1446) the coastal polity of Niumi was a local source for salt for the interior and caravans coming to the coast. The region's entanglement in Atlantic commerce at various points between the 17th and 20th centuries lead to a...