Sine, Saloum and a Kingdom Outlasted

The Serer are a people of west central Senegal and the Gambia, concentrated in the historic kingdoms of Sine and Saloum, whose origins Henry Gravrand's study of Serer civilization traces to migrations that met and mixed with populations already settled around the stone circle and tumulus fields of the Senegambia region, monuments UNESCO inscribed as World Heritage in 2006. Sine and Saloum kept their own royal lines and resisted incorporation into the neighboring Wolof kingdoms and later French colonial rule longer than most of their neighbors, in part because Serer religious and social structure, organized around patrilineal and matrilineal descent lines called yal and lignage maternel, did not depend on a single unifying monarchy the way some neighboring states did.

The last king of Sine, Mahecor Diouf, saw his kingdom abolished by French colonial authority in 1969, ending a monarchy that had continued in some form since the medieval period. Islam spread among the Serer more slowly and more recently than among the neighboring Wolof, and a substantial Serer minority still practices the indigenous religion openly rather than as a substrate beneath Islam, a distinction Senegalese scholarship treats as one of the more notable features of Serer identity within an overwhelmingly Muslim Senegal. Serer communities today are Muslim, Christian and practitioners of the traditional religion, often within the same extended family.