Peoples of The Gambia: The Jola

The people who have been longest resident in The Gambia are the Jolas.  At the present time they are located in the largest number in the Foni district of the Western Division.

This is approximately the same area in which early European travellers found them.

According to oral tradition, the Jolas called themselves "Ajamatau", but derived their name from the Mandinka who called them "Jola" meaning "someone who pays back for things given or done to him".

Jola communities were divided into family groups settled in hamlets which were scattered over several square miles that were independent of each other.  That is why Jola society has been described as "classless", "decentralised", "fragmentary", or "segmentary".  This was because unlike others like Mandinka or Wollof there was no paramount chief; rule being based solely at the village level.

Although the senior man of the founding lineage was the formal head of the community at the village level, he had no power other than as ritual leader and arbiter.  Each hamlet in Jola society was virtually autonomous and continually fragmenting.  As sons came of age, they left to found their own households elsewhere.

If a man was murdered, his eldest son inherited his sandals and the obligation to continue the feud until his father’s death was avenged.

When the Jola were attacked or planned a raid themselves, hamlets within a district sharing ties of patrilineal kinship, or traditions of common settlement, would unite under a proven warrior who was given full authority. 

This authority ended as soon as the occasion had passed.  Under serious pressure such as Fode Kaba Dumbuya’s attacks on the Fognis in the nineteenth century, such alliances proved very effective and assumed a permanent form in walled and heavily fortified villages.  These villages were ruled by a council of the heads of the component families under the nominal leadership of the head of the founding family.

The social organisation of the Jola had always been a rudimentary commmunal system.  Each patriarch with his relations, dependants and servants occupied a separate village walled in and stockarded against real or imagined enemies.

The Jolas for centuries continued to hold traditional African beliefs about the sacredness of the earth and the divine energy found in certain rocks and groves.

They expressed their religion and beliefs in song and dance as well as in shrines and masks.  Unlike most of the rest of the population of the Senegambia area, the Jola were highly resistant to change or the influence of other ethnic groups.  The Jola were the only sizeable population in The Gambia virtually untouched by Islam.  Many of them are still animist today.

The Jolas were an industrious people, who produced large quantities of rice in the creeks and mouth of the river.  They also kept bees in the forests around them, and collected not only honey from them but also bees wax.  Indeed the high quality bees wax of the Jolas was in great demand from European from European traders.

The Jola were also tappers of the famous palm wine, much of which they drank themselves though they found a ready market in Banjul once that town was founded in 1816.  Because the Jolas were so hard-working, they also provided labour as domestic servants in the Banjul households.