Genealogies of the ruling houses

The Bopolu line is the best documented of the interior dynasties, because three separate bodies of evidence converge on it: the Colonization Society correspondence of the 1820s and 1830s, the travel narrative of Benjamin Anderson, who reached Bopolu in 1868 and dealt with Sao Boso's son, and the Mandingo and Gola oral traditions collected by Warren d'Azevedo and Svend Holsoe in the mid-twentieth century.

Where the documents and the traditions agree — that Sao Boso founded the confederation, that Momoru Sao succeeded him, that the succession then broke down in the wars of the 1870s — the descent can be treated as established. Where they diverge, chiefly on Sao Boso's own parentage and on the number of his sons, the tradition is given here as tradition and marked accordingly.

One caution runs through the whole tree. Condo succession was not strictly patrilineal: a claimant's standing rested on his command of the road, his following in arms, and the consent of the confederated towns as much as on his birth. The chart below shows genealogical relationships, not an automatic order of inheritance.

This is a chart of a political order more than of a bloodline. Dei and Gola authority on the Mesurado ran through matrilineally-inflected town lineages and through the Poro, and the settlers' habit of calling every headman a 'king' flattened several distinct grades — town chief, war chief, landowning elder — into a single word.

The relationships below are therefore given as the sources give them: Zolu Duma as paramount of the cape, the others as neighbouring or subordinate kings, several of them bound to him by marriage or by clientage rather than by descent. Where a link is one of office rather than blood, it is marked as such.

Zolu Duma's own line is well attested at the moment of contact and almost invisible before it. He appears fully formed in the settler record of 1821 and dies, by the settlers' account, about 1839. Names given for his father in later tradition are not corroborated.

Vai political tradition runs back to the Manding migration under Kamara and Massaquoi leaders who reached the coast several centuries before 1822. Those origin traditions are recorded consistently across Vai towns, which lends them weight, but they compress generations and cannot be dated.

From the later eighteenth century the picture sharpens, because the Gallinas slave factories drew European and American record-keeping into the region: the correspondence of British anti-slave-trade cruisers, the Sierra Leone Vice-Admiralty registers, and the accounts of the Spanish trader Pedro Blanco's dealings all name the ruling houses they had to bargain with.

The tree separates what the traditions assert from what the shipping and treaty record confirms. It also flags the great methodological trap of this region: European traders recorded titles ('king of Gallinas') without recording which lineage held them in a given decade, so continuity of title is not evidence of continuity of house.