Darbo Jula: The Role of a Mandinka Jula Clan in the Long-Distance Trade of the Gambia River and Its Hinterland

Abstract

Through the peak years of the Gambia River slave trade, a clan with the surname Darbo was one of several Mandinka jula (merchant) clans whose members participated in the carriage and exchange of slaves, cloth, iron, salt, European manufactures, and other commodities between the lower Gambia and its broad eastern hinterland. Itinerant merchants had conducted long-distance trade along a general Gambia-Niger axis for several centuries prior to Portuguese arrival on the Senegambian coast. Thereafter, the growing demand for slaves at coastal and riverine points led to an increase in the east-west flow of merchandise. Most slaves exported from the Gambia through the middle of the seventeenth century came from populations living reasonably close to the river's banks, but for the century or more after 1650 Gambian slave exports came increasingly from the river's eastern hinterland, the several hundred miles of savannas stretching between the upper reaches of the navigable Gambia and the upper Niger. From this region merchants conveyed slaves of the Tanda, Mandinka, and Bambara ethnic groups down the Gambia for what was normally ultimate exchange into the Atlantic slave trade. Well placed to conduct this longdistance trade were members of the Darbo clan of jula. Like segments of other Mandinka jula clans, extended families of Darbo jula were settled in commercial villages along the river, where over the years they had developed social and economic ties with local residents and with members of the ruling families of the appropriate Gambian Mandinka states. From these locations, and with the aid of their strong local and regional influence, Darbo jula were able to participate actively and regularly in the long-distance trade of the Gambia-Niger commercial axis. Such a study as this, of the commercial operations of a specific jula clan and the importance of the clan's social integration in its overall economic success, takes on added meaning when placed in the proper context of longdistance trading operations in the larger Western Sudan. Therefore, relevant background information on the broad Western Sudanic trading complex, the general landlord-stranger types of relationships that made possible efficient long-distance trading, and jula clans in general precedes the more particular study of the Darbo jula.