Jola

The Jola, who call themselves Ajamat and are often written Diola in French sources, are a West Atlantic people of the mangrove coasts of Lower Casamance in southern Senegal. They inherit a wet-rice civilization at least a thousand years old, farming flooded paddies alongside palm-wine tapping and livestock herding, and probably entered the Casamance in the 1300s, absorbing the earlier Bainuk and their rice-growing lore.

Unlike the stratified kingdoms around them, most Jola villages kept an egalitarian order of family and neighbourhood wards led by elders, though Oussouye was ruled by a priest-king whose office was more sacred than secular.

Their ancestral faith addresses a single high being, Emit, through village shrines and water spirits, and boys enter manhood through the bukut initiation held once in a generation; in later centuries Mandinka neighbours brought Islam to the better-connected Jola communities.