Diakhao

Diakhao became the last capital of the Serer Kingdom of Sine, a place where royal authority was rooted in both living institutions and ancestral memory. The kings of Sine bore the title Maad a Sinig and ruled from about the fourteenth century within the Guelowar dynasty, in which noble women known as Lingeers held great standing. Tombs of kings, Guelowar nobles and Lingeers marked the town as a sacred political center, and the Kanger baobab served as a place of royal libation, joining a living tree to the ritual geography of the kingdom.

Diakhao lies in the Fatick region of western Senegal, in flat farming country inhabited by Serer people. The coastal port of Joal, one of the principalities of Sine, gave the kingdom a window on the Atlantic trade, while the capital stayed inland among its fields and sacred groves. Its graves and ceremonial places preserve the structure of a court in which dynastic descent, religious practice and control of the surrounding country were closely joined.