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Slavery existed in West Africa for many years before the Europeans arrived. Warring tribes had often raided each other’s villages and taken prisoners, who were then kept as slaves. But these slaves were treated as members of their new master’s family and many had a chance to eventually earn their freedom and were often able to cultivate their own land. Domestic slavery continued in the Gambia until early twentieth century.

In the Senegambia region, the British exported their slaves and other products such as ivory and wax, from James Island in the River Gambia. The River Gambia became a major trade route into the African interior and strategically important. Over the slave trade period there were consequently many skirmishes between traders of different nationalities over ownership of the fortified trading stations along the river. Fort James for example changed hands eight times over a sixty-year period. About 600 slaves a year were shipped from the Gambia. Even so, it was not always the Europeans but the Africans themselves who captured people for the growing and lucrative trade.

The British eventually abolished the slave trade in 1807 but France, Brazil, Portugal and the United States of America pursued it with even greater vigour. The British tried to enforce an end to the trade (which was damaging the rest of their trading enterprises) by placing their Royal Navy off the West African coast to chase down all slave ships headed for the New World and return the ‘Liberated Africans’ to the mainland. So after 1807 the British once again mounted troops at James Island in order to intercept the slavers, but they soon realized that St Mary’s Island at the mouth of the River Gambia was strategically better placed, especially since the French were still active in the slave trade from their trading post at Albreda. In 1816 a settlement at the island, renamed Bathurst, was founded. Some of the Liberated Africans later settled in Bathurst (now Banjul) and McCarthy Island in the Gambia. Britain finally abolished all slavery in 1833 and France followed suit in 1848. Such policies still did not end slavery which carried on up-river of Albreda and Fort James. In the 1880s some Muslim leaders in the Gambia for example were still taking slaves and exporting them and the trade continued until it died a natural death at the end of the century.