Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/217

 THE MANDINGANS. I75 tremondous powers to overawe and punish all violators of the "custom/' At present they are little more than clowns, the laughing-stock of the children. The Mandingans, who are now broken up into many rival petty states, are excellent husbandmen, but display their remarkable talents chiefly as traders. They have been compared to the Sarakoles, "the Jews of West Africa," but, unlike them, are chiefly wholesale dealers, carrying on a large caravan trade between Sierra-Leone and Timbuktu, and extending their expeditions from the Senegal to the lower Niger. Throughout West Africa they are also the chief preachers of Islam, and also command widespread influence as the disseminators of news and the champions of the new ideas, reporting to their brethren in the interior all the strange sights and the marvels of industry which they have witnessed amongst the Europeans of the seaboard. The Europeans. In the Gambia basin the European element is relatively very slight, and less influential than on the Senegal. Tn some years there are scarcely twenty European civilians in this so-called " Colony," and few officials reside long enough in the country to take an interest in the populations with whom they are brought into contact. The whites suffer chiefly from yellow fever, dysentery, and miasmatic infections, while the black soldiers from the West Indies fall victims to small-pox and consumption. It has been ascertained that the Jamaica Negroes resist the climate of the Gambia no better than the whites from the British Isles. Whole battalions have melted away in a few months, the average mortality of the troops being 480 per thousand. The half-caste element is also inconsiderable, not more than a few thousands being collectively classed as " Creoles," most of whom appear to be Catholic Wolofs from Goree and Rufisque, variously intermingled with Europeans, Mandingans, and Fulahs. Recently also African freedmen from the Niger, from the Slave Coast, and from Sierra-Leone have emigrated into the Gambia territory, where, being mostly Protestants, they hold aloof from the Wolofs, and compete severely with them, especially as retail dealers. Being hemmed in between the French Scnegambian posEessions and the southern rivers, the English trade in the Gambia basin is but of secondary importance, the exchanges not exceeding £160,000 altogether. Although the Gambia presents the shortest natural highway to the interior and to the Upper Senegal, it has, nevertheless, become a sort of cul-de-sac, affording but few means of communica- tion between the inland populations and the markets on the coast. The trade also, which since the middle of the century consists mostly of ground-nuts, has to a large extent fallen into the hands of the French, whose influence must necessarily increase whenever effect is given to the treaties concluded by the French Govern- ment with Futa- Jallon, and especially when the projected railway is constructed from Rufisque to Kaolak. Politically and commercially, the Gambia will then be encircled by territories subject to the suzerainty of France, "like a mouse in the jaws of a cat," as Mitchinson expresses it in " The Expiring Continent." In 1881