Senegal
Capital: Dakar · West Africa
Land of teranga (hospitality), the Jolof Empire, Sufi brotherhoods of Touba, and sabar drumming — with Gorée Island as a solemn Atlantic memorial.
Ethnic communities
- WolofJolof Empire heirs; urban culture, sabar drums, wrestling (làmb)
- SererAncient religious traditions (Roog), Sine-Saloum kingdoms
- Halpulaar (Toucouleur)Futa Toro Islamic state on the Senegal River
- Jola (Diola)Casamance rice civilizations and sacred groves
More communities of Senegal
- Mandinka · Kaabu's kora country in the south
- Soninke · Upper-river merchant-migrant towns
- Fulbe herders · Ferlo's cattle nomads
- Lebou · Cap-Vert fishers with ndëpp healing rites
- Bassari · Initiation-mask hill farmers (UNESCO landscape)
- Bedik · Cliff-village keepers of masked seasons
- Coniagui · Tenda kin of the southeastern hills
- Balanta & Manjak · Casamance rice and palm communities
- Papel · Border villages of Bissau kin
- Moorish (Naar) traders · Shopkeepers from the northern bank
- Laobe · Woodworker caste of spoons, mortars and charm
- Jakhanke · Peaceful clerical towns of the east
Languages
Major languages: Wolof, Pulaar, Serer, Diola, Mandinka, French
Language families: Niger-Congo (Atlantic, Mande)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Jolof Empire
- • Kingdoms of Sine and Saloum
- • Futa Toro
- • Kingdom of Cayor
Heritage sites
- • Island of Gorée
- • Saint-Louis
- • Senegambian stone circles
- • Bassari Country
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Senegal
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the artsb. 1953
Baaba Maal
Music
Pulaar singer and guitarist whose voice carried Senegalese music to global film scores, and a long-standing campaigner on health and climate.
- Science, business & activism1923–1986
Cheikh Anta Diop
History and physics
Physicist and historian who argued for ancient Egypt's African context and built a radiocarbon dating laboratory in Dakar. The university there carries his name.
- Politics & liberationc. 1842–1886
Lat Dior Ngoné Latyr Diop
Anticolonial resistance
Damel of Cayor who fought French expansion and the railway that came with it. Killed in battle at Dékheulé and remembered as a national resistance figure.
- Politics & liberation1906–2001
Léopold Sédar Senghor
Statecraft and Négritude
Poet, co-founder of the Négritude movement and Senegal's first president. Stepped down voluntarily in 1980, a rarity in his generation of leaders.
- Music & the arts1923–2007
Ousmane Sembène
Cinema and literature
Docker turned novelist turned film-maker, called the father of African cinema, who switched to film so that he could reach people who did not read.
- Sportb. 1992
Sadio Mané
Football
Champions League winner and twice African Footballer of the Year, who scored the penalty that won Senegal its first Africa Cup of Nations in 2022.
- Music & the artsb. 1959
Youssou N'Dour
Mbalax
The defining voice of mbalax, a Grammy winner and a figure of such standing at home that his concerts function as national events.
Deep-dive community profiles
Bainunka
The people who were there first — the original inhabitants of much of the Casamance and Gambia river country, absorbed over centuries by Mandinka and Jola neighbours, and now among the most endangered communities in West Africa.
Open deep profile →Balanta
Guinea-Bissau's largest people and its most stubbornly ungoverned — mangrove rice farmers who refused kings, chiefs and colonial administration alike, who filled the ranks of the liberation war, and who feed the country.
Open deep profile →Bambara (Bamana)
Mali's largest people — farmers of the upper Niger whose Segou kingdom, chi wara antelope crests and the six graded komo initiation societies made Bamanankan the nation's lingua franca and their art a canon of world sculpture.
Open deep profile →Bassari
The people of the south-eastern hills — one of West Africa's least assimilated communities, whose age-grade initiations and masked wrestling matches take place in a landscape UNESCO listed precisely because the way of life is still being lived.
Open deep profile →Fulani (Fulbe)
The great pastoral nation of the Sahel — some 40 million people scattered from Senegal to Sudan, keepers of the pulaaku ethical code, founders of Islamic reform states, and among them the Wodaabe, whose Gerewol beauty festival is world-famous.
Open deep profile →Haalpulaar of the Senegal River
The black Mauritanians of the river valley — Pulaar-speaking farmers and herders whose expulsion in 1989 sent tens of thousands across the river, and whose citizenship in the country of their birth is still contested.
Open deep profile →Jola (Diola)
The rice-farming people of the Casamance and Lower Gambia — decentralised and fiercely independent, keepers of the awasena religion of the shrine-spirits (boekin), the great king-priest of Oussouye, and the wrestling and mask traditions of the estuary forests.
Open deep profile →Karoninka
A small rice-growing people of the lower river islands, related to the Jola but distinct in speech, whose language is spoken by a few thousand and whose bolong creeks and mangrove paddies are among the oldest wet-rice landscapes in West Africa.
Open deep profile →Khassonké
The people between two worlds — a Mande-Fula fusion of western Mali whose Kayes homeland was France's first colonial capital in the Sudan, the terminus of the Dakar-Niger railway, and the source of a large share of France's West African migration.
Open deep profile →Lebou
The fishing people of Cape Verde peninsula — the original inhabitants of the ground Dakar stands on, who declared their own republic in 1790, and whose ndeup healing ceremonies still draw the city's residents to the shore.
Open deep profile →Mandinka
The westernmost great branch of the Mandé world — heirs of the Mali Empire whose griots, kora harpists and farming villages carried Sunjata's legacy to the Atlantic, from the Gambia River to the Guinea highlands.
Open deep profile →Manjaco
The weavers and migrants of Guinea-Bissau's north-west — cloth producers whose strip-woven panels were currency along the coast, kingdoms at Bassarel and Caió, and a community that has sent its young to Dakar, Lisbon and Paris for a century and built its villages on what they sent back.
Open deep profile →Serahule (Soninke of the Gambia)
The Gambia's traders and diamond dealers — Soninke people descended from the founders of ancient Ghana, who kept a merchant network from the upper river to Sierra Leone's mines and Europe's cities, and who are the country's most conspicuously commercial community.
Open deep profile →Serer
Guardians of Senegal's oldest religious tradition — the people of Sine and Saloum whose pangool ancestor-saints, sacred baobabs, wrestling arenas and poet-presidents (Senghor was Serer) kept an unbroken covenant with land and sea.
Open deep profile →Soninke
Founders of Wagadu — the Ghana Empire, West Africa's first great state — whose gold-road merchants, the Wangara, seeded trade diasporas from the Sahara to the forest, and whose epic of the serpent Bida still explains the empire's fall.
Open deep profile →Wolof
Senegal's leading nation and the culture of teranga (hospitality) — heirs of the Jolof Empire, marshals of sabar drumming and làmb wrestling, whose Sufi brotherhoods and mbalax rhythms define the modern Senegambian world.
Open deep profile →