Kingdom of Niani

The Kingdom of Niani was a Mandinka state on the north bank of the Gambia River, in what is now The Gambia and Senegal. According to oral tradition, it was founded in the fourteenth century by Cansia Kamara, a member of the Kamara clan who had left the town of Niani in the Mali Empire after a failed rebellion. He established Koumpentoum as the capital of the new kingdom, which took the name of the old homeland. Niani controlled the river trade and became an important intermediary for gold from Bambuk and Bure moving down the Gambia to European merchants from the fifteenth century onward. The kingdom was never highly centralized. During the nineteenth century its upper and lower branches were ruled by separate Kamara lines, and the capital was moved first to Diambour and later to Ndougousine. Torodbe refugees from Futa Toro spread Islam among the population in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though the aristocracy long kept its traditional beliefs. Niani clashed with British traders on MacCarthy Island in the 1820s and was gradually incorporated into the French colony of Senegal in the late nineteenth century.