Serer

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.

Serer religion holds Roog, called Roog Sene in some communities, as a single remote creator who set the world in order but is not approached directly in ordinary worship; Henry Gravrand's account of Serer cosmology and John Mbiti's survey of African religions both describe the pangool as the working intermediaries of Serer religious life, the spirits of the founding ancestors and of the land who receive offerings, are consulted through divination and are held responsible for the fertility of fields and the wellbeing of lineages. The most public expression of this system is the Xooy, an annual divination ceremony UNESCO recognized on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013, in which saltigue diviners, whose office is inherited within particular families, enter trance to foretell the coming rainy season, warn of dangers and prescribe remedies before an assembled crowd.

Initiation, agricultural ritual and funerary rites toward the pangool and the ancestors continue as lived practice in Sine and Saloum villages rather than as folklore, observed by a Serer population that Senegalese sources estimate retains one of the highest shares of traditional religion practitioners of any Senegalese ethnic group. Islam has nonetheless become the majority faith among Serer as among most of Senegal, typically coexisting with rather than replacing address to the pangool, and a smaller Serer Christian minority exists alongside both.