Kaabu

The Kaabu kingdom, from its capital Kansala, controlled what is today northeastern Guinea-Bissau and southern Senegal for more than six centuries.

Founded in 1250 by Tiramakhan Traore, a Mandinke general from the kingdom of Mali, Kaabu dominated small chiefdoms and enslaved the indigenous peoples of the region. Kaabu was a socially stratified kingdom that determined its royal succession through matrilineal descent. It expanded its power and territory slowly, unable to shed its initial dependency on the Mali Empire. The Kaabu kingdom remained an important source of salt, gold, and slaves for the larger state until the Songhai kingdom conquered Mali in the mid-15th century. Kaabu asserted its independence, gaining much of its power through waging war against its neighbors in efforts to supply the increasing European demand for the transatlantic slave trade. Kaabu ruled over 44 provinces at its peak but deteriorated rapidly when the slave trade declined in the late 18th century. By the mid-19th century the Kaabu kingdom was subject to internal and external pressures, including holy wars, orjihads (see Islam), waged by the Fulani, an Islamic people of the area. In 1867 the Fulani, with an army of 12,000 soldiers, forced the surrender of the last Kaabu king from his throne in Kansala.

Further reading: Jean Boutlegue and Suret-Canale, “The Western African Coast,” in History of West Africa, 3rd ed., eds. J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (London: Longman, 1985), 1: 503-530; Eric Young, “Kaabu, Early Kingdom of,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Basic Civi-tas, Books, 1999), 1,073.

—Lisa M. Brady

Kayor See Cayor