Godala

The Godala were the southernmost of the three great Sanhaja Berber tribes, nomads of the Atlantic Sahara from the Dakhla coast to the Senegal River mouth, holding the Awlil salt deposits. Caravans carried salt along the river and traded on a coastal route to southern Morocco, their land bordering Takrur.

In the 1040s their chief Yahya ibn Ibrahim brought the theologian Abdallah ibn Yasin from pilgrimage, and the tribe became the first cradle of the Almoravid movement. When they rebelled against his strict rule, ibn Yasin withdrew to a ribat on an island in the Bay of Arguin; they nonetheless formed one of the three Almoravid coalition tribes that conquered the western Maghreb and al-Andalus.

In the Char Bouba war of 1644 to 1674 the coastal Sanhaja fell to the Arab Beni Hassan, and the Godala clans were gradually Arabized or absorbed.