Kaabu

Kaabu was a Mandinka polity in Senegambia, centred on Kansala. Conquered for Mali by Tiramakhan Traore in the thirteenth century, it became a Mali province; its Nyancho warrior aristocracy preserved non-Islamic rites.

As Mali weakened, Kaabu's rulers asserted independence, conventionally dated to 1537. Its wars supplied captives to the Atlantic slave trade, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they may have made up half the Africans sold from the region. From 1776, war with the imamate of Futa Djallon helped wear down the Nyancho state.