Peoples, roads & centuries

Before opening the first chapter, see the country whole: sixteen peoples across four language families, the towns that mattered, the roads that joined them to the western Sudan and the Atlantic — and the two and a half thousand years that produced them.

I — The interactive map

Tap a territory, a town or a trade road. Filter by language family to see how Mande, Mel and Kru speech communities interlock across the forest belt.

Reconstructive cartography. Territories are drawn as soft zones because pre-colonial polities held frontiers rather than borders. Squares mark capitals, circles ports and markets; dashed lines are principal trade roads.

Mande (northern)

Vai

also Vei, Gallinas

Coastal Mande traders between Cape Mount and the Mano, later authors of the Vai script.

The Vai reached the Atlantic from the Mande interior in a movement usually placed in the sixteenth century, settling the lagoons and river mouths around Cape Mount and the Gallinas. Their position gave them the two things an Atlantic middleman needed: salt pans and a lagoon system navigable by canoe far inland. They dealt in salt, cloth, kola, camwood and — increasingly and destructively after about 1700 — captives. Vai lineages held both Poro and Sande, and their towns were among the first on this coast to keep written accounts, once Dualu Bukele's syllabary appeared in the 1830s.

Principal towns

Gon
Tombey
Cape Mount towns

Crafts & economy

Salt boiling
Cotton weaving
Canoe building
Goldsmithing

Sources: Holsoe 1990; Dunn, Beyan & Burrowes 2000

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II — The timeline

From the first bloomery furnaces of the forest margin to the flag raised on Cape Mesurado. Scroll the axis and tap any marker for the evidence behind it.

Colonisation · 25 April 1822

Settlement at Cape Mesurado

The settlers raise their flag on Cape Mesurado after the crisis of that April is mediated by Sao Boso and King Brister. The pre-1822 world does not end here — but the record of it changes hands, and this volume closes.

Sources: Ashmun, in Captan 2015; ACS correspondence

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