Cayor

Cayor, in Wolof Kajoor, was the greatest Wolof kingdom of the Senegalese coast, lasting from 1549 to 1886. When the Jolof Empire cracked, Cayor walked out first and proudest: the largest and strongest of the successor states, holding the Atlantic shore north of Baol, taxing the gum arabic trade and breeding the cavalry that made its Damels feared from Waalo to Sine. For three centuries the Damels played Moors against Frenchmen, raiding, treating and breaking treaties with desert skill, while Islam and the old Tiado religion divided courts and villages. The French came in earnest in the nineteenth century: two wars, railways pushed inland, peanut fields fenced, and the heroic Damel Lat Dior, who fought the invaders for twenty-five years, died in battle in 1886. With him Cayor ended, folded into French Senegal, leaving the Wolof proverb that a king is buried but kingship, like the tide at Yoff, returns.