Dyula

The Dyula, also called Wangara or Juula, are a Mande Muslim merchant people whose name means merchant in Manding. After Mande elites adopted Islam in the 1200s, Mali's rulers encouraged traders to found colonies near southern goldfields in the following century, and from the 1300s Dyula families spread from Senegambia to the Niger bend and from the Sahara's edge to the forest belt.

They settled in self-governing quarters under local rulers, running caravan firms built on the lu, a household of a father, his sons and attached men, and founded trading cities including Begho and Kong. Around 1500 the cleric Salim Suwari shaped their Suwarian tradition, which taught coexistence with non-Muslim rulers and jihad only for self-defence.

In 1710 the Dyula leader Seku Watara united the merchant houses into the Kong Empire; after his death around 1745 it devolved into rival fiefs, Kong itself remaining a famed gold and kola market.