The Gambia’s Aku descend from Yorùbá and other Liberated Africans who came from Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century: a small community with a large place in Gambian life.
History
From the 1830s, some Liberated Africans from Sierra Leone, many of them Yorùbá, were resettled in Bathurst, now Banjul, the British settlement founded in 1816 at the mouth of the Gambia River. Others followed as traders and clerks.
,_The_Gambia,_1904.jpg){kind=link}
Community Life
The Gambian Aku became a small but influential community, prominent in the colonial civil service, the professions, the churches and education. Both Christian and Muslim families belong to it, and it keeps a distinct identity, with Krio-related speech and customs, to this day.