Beyond Migration and Conquest: Oral Traditions and Mandinka Ethnicity in Senegambia

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Periodical article

Title:	Beyond Migration and Conquest: Oral Traditions and Mandinka Ethnicity in Senegambia
Author:	Wright, Donald R.
Year:	1985
Periodical:	History in Africa
Volume:	12
Pages:	335-348
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Senegal Gambia
Subjects:	Manding migration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Urbanization and Migration History and Exploration Education and Oral Traditions
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171727
Abstract:	One of the most prevalent and widely-accepted themes in the history of the Mandinka of Senegambia concerns the great Mandinka migrations, the westward movement of large groups of people that included the distant ancestors of today's Senegambian Mandinka population. The migrants are supposed to have come from traditional Manding homelands east and southeast of present locations of Mandinka peoples in Senegambia; conquest and longterm settlement were usual results of these migrations. In recent years the author has come to consider several factors that led him to doubt that Mandinka migrations (with the effect of replacing one population with another) ever took place. If these doubts are borne out by investigations in the years to come, there will be important implications for the study of early Senegambian Mandinka history, of course, but just as importantly, there will be reason to think again about the perhaps out-of-date concept of Mandinka, and other African and non-African ethnicity. - Notes.