Gambia

The Gambia, officially the Republic of The Gambia, is a country in Western Africa. It is the smallest country on the African continental mainland and is bordered to the north, east, and south by Senegal, and has a small coast on the Atlantic Ocean in the west. more...

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The River Gambia flows through the centre of the country and empties into the Atlantic Ocean. On 18 February 1965, The Gambia became independent from the British Empire. Banjul is its capital.

History

The first written accounts of the region come from records of Arab traders in the ninth and tenth centuries AD. In 1066, the inhabitants of Tekrur, a kingdom centered on the Sénégal River just to the north, became the first people in the region to convert to Islam. Muslim traders established the trans-Saharan trade route for slaves, gold, and ivory. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, most of what is today called The Gambia was a tributary to the Mali Empire. The Portuguese reached the area by sea in the mid-fifteenth century and began to dominate the lucrative trade.

In 1588, the claimant to the Portuguese throne, António, Prior of Crato, sold exclusive trade rights on the Gambia River to English merchants; this grant was confirmed by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I. In 1618, James I granted a charter to a British company for trade with Gambia and the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Between 1651 and 1661, part of Gambia was (indirectly) a colony of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; it was purchased by the Courlandish prince Jakub Kettler. At that time Courland, in present-day Latvia, was a fiefdom of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Courlanders settled on James Island, which they called St. Andrews Island, and used it as a trade base from 1651 until it was captured by the English in 1661.

During the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, England and France struggled continually for political and commercial supremacy in the regions of the Senegal and Gambia rivers. The 1783 Treaty of Versailles gave Great Britain possession of the Gambia river, but the French retained a tiny enclave at Albreda on its north bank, which was ceded to the United Kingdom in 1857.

As many as three million slaves may have been taken from the region during the three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1807, slave trading was abolished throughout the British Empire, and the British tried unsuccessfully to end the practice in Gambia. They established the military post of Bathurst (now Banjul) in 1816. In the ensuing years, Banjul was at times under the jurisdiction of the British governor-general in Sierra Leone. In 1888, Gambia became a separate colonial entity. In 1889, it became a crown colony.

After World War II, the pace of constitutional reform quickened. Following general elections in 1962, full internal self-government was granted in 1963. The Gambia gained independence on February 18, 1965, as a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth of Nations. On April 24, 1970, The Gambia became a republic following a referendum. (The word "The" became an official part of the name only upon independence.)

Read more at Wikipedia.org