Aku of the Gambia

Population: A few thousand, historically influential far beyond their numbers

Location: Banjul, particularly the old Half Die and Portuguese Town quarters, and the Kombo settlements

Language: Aku, a Krio variety, alongside English; Yoruba retained liturgically in some families

Language family: English-lexifier creole (Krio/Aku); Niger-Congo → Yoruba (ancestral)

Traditional governance: Church and mosque committees, and, historically, the professional associations of a community that dominated the colonial civil service and bar.

Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.

Clothing: Victorian-derived formal dress in the older Christian tradition; the Aku Marabout adopted West African Muslim dress; both retain distinctive wedding and funeral clothing.

Food: Krio dishes carried from Freetown — akara, foofoo, plasas — alongside Gambian benachin and domoda; the awujoh feast for the dead is the community's signature meal.

Ceremonies: Awujoh, a feast for the ancestors held at intervals after a death, practised by Christian and Muslim Aku alike; church and mosque calendars; elaborate funerals.

Marriage customs: Church or Islamic marriage; community endogamy was strong for a century and has weakened; marriage across the Christian-Muslim line within the Aku happens and is remarked on.

Initiation rites: Formal schooling, pursued intensely: the community's mission education produced a professional class out of proportion to its size.

Every dish the Atlas publishes for The Gambia and Sierra Leone, at national rather than community level — 15 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.

“Wan han nor de tay bandul.”

“One hand cannot tie a bundle.”

A Krio proverb on cooperation.

“We came off the ships with nothing but the alphabet.”

Education as the recaptive inheritance.

“Same name, different Friday.”

The Christian and Muslim Aku, as they joke about themselves.

Creation: Christian and Islamic cosmologies respectively; beneath both, Yoruba ancestral practice surviving most visibly in the awujoh feast.

Beliefs: Anglicanism, Methodism and Catholicism among the Christian Aku; Sunni Islam among the Aku Marabout; the awujoh ancestral feast practised by both, which clergy of both faiths have periodically objected to.

Ancestors: Genealogies run back to a named recaptive ancestor and often to a ship and a year; the Yoruba origin is claimed with precision where it can be.

Traditional settlements: Banjul's old quarters of two-storey timber and corrugated-iron houses with deep verandahs and shuttered windows, a Krio building style carried from Freetown.

Building techniques: Timber frame with iron sheeting, raised on piers; deep verandahs and jalousie shutters for ventilation; the style is recognisably the same as Freetown's board houses.

Village layout: Streets of verandahed houses around the churches and mosques of Half Die and Portuguese Town, in a capital built on a low sandy island.

1. 1808–1860s

   The Royal Navy lands liberated Africans at Freetown; many are Yoruba, known as Aku.

2. 1816–1830s

   Bathurst is founded; Aku families are resettled there from Sierra Leone.

3. 1850s–1950s

   The community supplies much of the colony's professional and clerical class.

4. 1965

   Gambian independence; the Aku remain influential in law, medicine and the civil service.

5. Present

   A small community with a disproportionate institutional legacy; the board houses of Banjul survive unevenly.