Karafoo ye jotentung saabang (‘entrustment precedes cowardice’): in
the Mandinka language, as spoken along the River Gambia and in
the nearby area of Casamance, this idiomatic expression asserts the
importance of trust in the articulation of society.1 Its sense could be
explained like this: ‘even the man who runs away when in danger should
be brave if the person entrusted to him gets in trouble’.
The Mandinka word that I translate as ‘entrustment’ is karafoo.
Elsewhere (Bellagamba 2000, 2002a), I have analysed some of its
layered meanings, which include the care of valuable things, the practice
of child-fostering, and the ties of confidence and reciprocal assistance
built up between a stranger and his host. ‘Ngakarafaaima’ (‘I entrust
myself to you’) is a ‘voluntary declaration of allegiance’ for the sake of
protection (Goody 1970: 5), one which the historical memories related
to the development of local communities and pre-colonial polities in
this area of West Africa put at the core of host–stranger relationships. In
the longue duree´ , ‘entrustment’ speaks indeed of the patterns of trade and
mobility, which for centuries characterised the River Gambia, linked as
it was by long-distance trade routes to the interior of Senegambia, to the
Sahara and, since the late fifteenth century, to European commercial
interests and the Atlantic markets as well. Seasonal and more stable
forms of migration interested the riverside even before the nineteenth
century, a period in which the development of commercial-scale
groundnut cultivation attracted a flow of labourers towards Senegambia.
People joined caravans on a temporary basis. They were looking for
pastures, commercial opportunities and land to settle on, and at times
they were also escaping the attacks from more aggressive neighbouring
polities (Swindell 1981: 86–87).