This is the script for my video posted on July 1, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
If you zoom in on West Africa, you might notice that Senegal completely surrounds another country, a tiny sliver of land called The Gambia. This is the smallest country on mainland Africa at just over 11000 square kilometers, but it has over 2.4m people, and its history is fascinating. So why does The Gambia exist in the first place, and what place does it have in geopolitics?
Centuries ago, what is now The Gambia was part of the great Sahelian empires of West Africa, like Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and later the Mandinka federation of Kaabu. By around 1800, there were over a dozen local Mandinka kingdoms scattered in the vicinity of the Gambia river, as well as huge numbers of Wolof, Fula, and other peoples. The river runs about 1100km from the Fouta Djallon plateau in Guinea to Senegal and The Gambia, and it’s navigable for roughly half of that length. It was one of the earliest European trade routes into the West African interior, and it allowed European powers to extract gold, ivory, beeswax, animal hides, and enslaved people.
From the late 16th century onward, France and Britain competed in the Senegambia region, with French trade focused on the Senegal River and Cap-Vert, while the British focused on the Gambia River. Britain established a coastal settlement at Bathurst, today called Banjul, in 1816, and in 1821 they formalized it as a colony placed under the administration of British West Africa. The region remained largely independent, and in the mid to late 19th century, the Soninke-Marabout Wars kicked off, and those were arguably the defining events of the early colonial period. The wars and the cost of the colony more broadly led Britain to attempt to trade The Gambia to France for territory on the upper Niger twice in the 1870s, but domestic and Gambian opposition blocked it. The wars saw a schism within Mandinka society between the animist-leaning Soninke kings and the Muslim Marabout clerics and merchants, and they ultimately led to Islamicization of the region and weakened polities ahead of colonial consolidation.
In 1889, Britain and France signed a convention setting the border 10 kilometers north and south of the river and east to Yarbutenda, with a 10km radius around the eastern terminus. This meant Britain controlled the Gambia River as far as it could be navigated by sea-going vessels, and though it was seen as temporary at the time, it has never changed. The two powers then formed a joint boundary commission to enforce the decision against local armed resistance. Five years later, in 1894, Britain imposed a protectorate over the interior lands, divided into 35 chiefdoms under indirect rule. Slavery was abolished across the protectorate in 1906, and the regional economy became dangerously monocultural, exporting mostly peanuts.
Britain assumed The Gambia would eventually merge with Senegal. It gained full internal self-government in 1963 and formal independence in 1965, as a constitutional monarchy and a member of the British Commonwealth, though a 1970 referendum made them a Republic within the Commonwealth, meaning they have their own head of state instead of the British monarch.
In 1981, while Gambian President Dawda Jawara was attending the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in London, a left-wing faction drawn from the Gambia Socialist Revolutionary Party and disaffected members of the paramilitary Field Force attempted a coup in response to a worsening economy and allegations of government corruption. They proclaimed a National Revolutionary Council, and Jawara requested military aid from Senegal, which ultimately deployed about 2,700 troops to defeat the rebel force. After that, Senegal and The Gambia signed a treaty forming the Senegambia Confederation, a partnership in which both countries kept their sovereignty while integrating their militaries, economies, and currencies. Many Gambians saw it as tilted toward Senegal, which wanted to link its north to the Casamance region that The Gambia physically splits in two. The Gambia resisted deeper union, and the confederation collapsed when Senegal dissolved it in 1989.
In 1994, a military group called the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council, or AFPRC, deposed Jawara's government. Jawara fled aboard a visiting US warship, the USS La Moure County, and ended up in exile in London, while the opposition was banned from political activity. Senegal did not intervene this time. The AFPRC's young leader, Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh, brought in a new constitution that restored elections but notably included no presidential term limits, and Jammeh went on to win a series of votes that observers widely judged neither free nor fair. From that point onward, Jammeh and his associates made hundreds of millions of dollars from state telecom companies, illicit timber revenue, more than 100m dollars in aid from Taiwan, as well as the central bank, a pension fund, and the state oil company.
Jammeh’s regime was often ridiculous. In 2007, he claimed to have discovered a cure to HIV in a dream, and the UN envoy to the country was expelled for criticizing it. He withdrew from the Commonwealth in 2013 and the International Criminal Court in 2016, and he unilaterally declared The Gambia an Islamic Republic in late 2015 without changing the secular constitution.
In 2016, after more than two decades of Jammeh’s rule, a united opposition rallied behind a property developer named Adama Barrow, who agreed to take on a single three-year transitional term if he won the presidential election. He won, and though Jammeh initially conceded on December 2nd, he reversed himself about a week later, which triggered a constitutional crisis. In January 2017, the head of the ECOWAS Commission declared that The Gambia was surrounded by land, sea, and air, and that a total of 7000 troops would participate in a mission to reestablish democracy. For context, the entire Gambian army numbered only about 2500 men. Barrow was sworn into office at the Gambian embassy in Dakar, Senegal shortly thereafter, and the UN Security Council passed a resolution backing ECOWAS through political means first. Jammeh ultimately fled to Equatorial Guinea with an unknown amount of money and a long list of human rights abuses.
This brings us to today. I mentioned before that Jammeh had stolen from aid supplied by Taiwan. This is probably The Gambia’s most famous geopolitical dynamic, because the country flip-flopped repeatedly between China and Taiwan for nearly 50 years. In 2013, Jammeh abruptly cut ties with Taiwan. China initially declined to engage because it had a diplomatic truce in place with Taiwan at the time, but in 2016 China and The Gambia formally resumed relations just two months after pro-independence candidate Tsai Ing-wen won Taiwan's presidential election, and before she was even inaugurated. The timing was the whole point: China moved in that window to signal its displeasure and pressure the incoming government.
Even after Jammeh’s removal, The Gambia has continued to struggle. Barrow ditched his three-year term pledge, formed his own party, and won reelection in 2021. Draft constitutions have repeatedly failed to pass, and term limits are still not in place as a result, creating fears of democratic backsliding. There was a coup attempt in 2022, and though it was foiled, it underlines the country’s persistent military and political fragility. And as ECOWAS has lost several members in the last few years, The Gambia remains a small, pro-ECOWAS state operating in a fractured bloc, with Russia, Turkiye, Iran, and China all vying for influence over the region.
Keep reading
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I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.