Serer

The Serer are one of the oldest peoples of Senegambia, farming the lands of Sine, Saloum and Baol in Senegal. Their traditions trace them to the Senegal River valley in Futa Tooro, from which they began moving south in the 1000s after War Jabi, king of Takrur, imposed Islamic law and persecuted subjects who kept the old beliefs.

Their early villages were led by lamans, priestly landowners, and later by the Wagadou, a maternal dynasty of Soninke origin. In 1335 the Mandinka leader Maysa Wali, fleeing the troubles of Kaabu, took refuge among them and founded the Guelowar line of the kings of Sine, whose kingdom stood beside the sister kingdom of Saloum.

Serer society combined matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance and kept its ancestral religion, centred on the supreme being Roog and the Pangool spirits, through the jihads and Atlantic slave trade of the following centuries.