Banjul

Banjul was founded in 1816, when Captain Alexander Grant established a British post on the sandy island at the mouth of the Gambia River to control the waterway and suppress the seaborne slave trade. The settlement was named Bathurst after the colonial secretary, built up with houses, barracks and trading houses, and peopled by soldiers, merchants and liberated Africans landed from intercepted ships. The island, then called St Mary's, was low, swampy and unhealthy; the south-eastern quarter is still called Half Die, a name said to recall the high death toll of the 1837 yellow fever outbreak or the 1869 cholera epidemic.

For a century and a half the town was the administrative and commercial centre of a colony whose wealth came from groundnuts shipped down the river. Wharves, warehouses and the market handled the crop, while the British governed from the island and the interior was ruled indirectly through chiefs. Bathurst grew slowly and stayed small, hemmed in by water on every side.

The Gambia became independent in 1965 with Bathurst as its capital, and the city was renamed Banjul in 1973. Because the island could not expand, growth went to the mainland instead: Serekunda and the coastal towns overtook the capital many times over, and Banjul became a place of offices, ministries, the port and the market rather than of homes. Arch 22, built in 1996 at the entrance to the city, belongs to the later era of Yahya Jammeh's rule, which ended with the political transition of 2016 and 2017.

Banjul has long had a Wolof majority among its African population, and the mix on its streets — Wolof, Mandinka, Fula, Jola, Serer, Aku and Lebanese trading families — has given it a distinct urban identity. The Aku, descendants of liberated Africans and settlers from Sierra Leone, were prominent in the colonial town as clerks, teachers and traders, and their Krio language and Christian congregations are part of the city's character alongside its mosques.

Islam shapes the public calendar. The call to prayer from the King Fahad Mosque and dozens of smaller mosques marks the day, Friday midday prayers empty the offices, and Koriteh and Tobaski are the great family festivals. The small Christian minority keeps Christmas and Easter, and religious mixing within families is normal and unremarkable.

Music is central. Griot families, the hereditary praise singers and oral historians of the region, perform at naming ceremonies and weddings, and the kora and balafon are heard alongside mbalax, reggae and Gambian hip hop from shop speakers and taxis. National ceremonies fill July 22 Square, and wrestling, played out in sand rings with drumming and charms, remains a popular spectacle. Manners are formal by regional standards: long greetings, respect for elders, and the use of the right hand.

Only about 26,000 people live in the city itself, recorded at the 2024 census, but the Greater Banjul Area holds about 400,000, and the population of the island falls steeply each evening as workers cross to Serekunda, Bakau and the settlements strung along the coast. The island cannot grow, so the capital functions as a workplace: ministries, banks, the courts, the port, the market and the ferry.

The port is the country's economic hinge, handling the country's imports and exports as well as the groundnut trade that built the town. Government employment, trading, fishing and the transport business around the ferry and the market account for most work; tourism earnings arrive from the coast rather than here. Many buildings in the centre are colonial-era structures in poor repair, and the city's low elevation means that heavy rain floods streets and compounds in the wet season.

The day starts early, with market deliveries and the first ferry, quietens in the heat of the afternoon, and ends with the commute out of town. Attaya, green tea brewed in three sweet rounds over a charcoal burner, is drunk through the afternoon in compounds and on shop steps, and it is the setting for the slow conversation that fills a Banjul evening.

Banjul eats the dishes of the wider Senegambian coast, built on rice and fish. Benachin, known in Senegal as thieboudienne, is rice cooked in a thick sauce of tomato, fish and vegetables in one pot, and is the everyday midday meal. Domoda, a groundnut stew with meat or fish served over rice, and yassa, chicken or fish in a sharp sauce of onions, lemon and mustard, are the other mainstays, with superkanja, an okra stew enriched with palm oil and smoked fish.

Fish and shellfish come from the Atlantic and the creeks: bonga and barracuda smoked or grilled, prawns from the mangroves, and oysters gathered by women from the roots in the Tanbi wetlands and sold along the road. Street eating means afra — meat barbecued over wood and served with onions and chilli in a length of tapalapa, the dense baguette-like local bread — along with akara bean fritters, grilled corn and small bags of roasted groundnuts.

Drinks are mostly non-alcoholic. Attaya is the social ritual; wonjo, a deep red infusion of hibiscus, baobab juice from the fruit's chalky pulp, and ginger and tamarind drinks are sold chilled in bags and bottles. Mangoes, cashew fruit, papaya and oranges fill the market in season, and beer is available in bars, mainly on the coast rather than in the city centre.