Gola

The Gola are an indigenous people of western Liberia, between the Mano and Saint Paul rivers in Lofa and Bomi, with kindred communities in Sierra Leone. Their Gola language, long classed as a Mel tongue, was at times written in the Vai script.

They were the earlier inhabitants of Cape Mount: Vai oral history says Mandinka traders from Manding married Gola women and fathered the Vai people. From the sixteenth century Mandinka merchants brought Islam, which most Gola gradually adopted.

Early in the nineteenth century Zolu Duma, called King Peter, ruled the Gola and Vai lands, growing rich trading slaves with European ships at Cape Mesurado. In 1822 an American naval officer forced him at gunpoint to sell the cape to the American Colonization Society, whose settlers founded Monrovia; Zolu Duma died in 1827, succeeded by his son.