Abstract:“Mandingization,” the gradual process of cultural change whereby Jola peoples of the Casamance region of southern Senegal are becoming more like their Mandinka neighbors, is analyzed in this article as comprising four distinguishable processes: ethnogenesis, ethnocultural drift, ethnic osmosis, and ethnic strategizing. By distinguishing among these four processes and analyzing their interaction, we can understand the dynamics of Mandingization more clearly and also derive insights for understanding ethnic change generally. The current moment of ethnic change in The Gambia includes a resurgence in Karon Jola ethnic identity, but we need to view this process as contingent, not yet accomplished, and a challenge to the pattern of Mandinka dominance in a time of broader social change.

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The twentieth-century religious history of the Kalorn (Karon Jolas) in the Alahein River Valley of the Gambia/Casamance border cannot be reduced to a single narrative. Today extended families include Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of the traditional Awasena 'religion of pouring'. A body of funeral songs highlights the views of those who resisted pressure toward conversion to Islam through the 1930s, '40s and '50s. The introduction of a Roman Catholic mission in the early 1960s created new social and economic possibilities that consolidated an identity that stood as an alternative to the Muslim-Mandinka model. This analysis emphasizes the equal importance of both macropolitical and economic factors and the more proximal effects of reference groups in understanding religious conversion. Finally, this discussion of the origins of religious pluralism within a community grants insight into how conflicts along religious lines have been defused.

This examination of local government reform in The Gambia asserts that -contra Mamdani's (1996) generalisations that colonial policies of indirect rule in Africa universally determined that ethnicity is the master code through which ordinary people interact with local manifestations of the state -in some cases colonial administration contributed to more pluralist local politics. Further, I argue that the logics of developmentalism have joined with local models of political legitimacy to generate communities that actively choose to define themselves explicitly as multiethnic entities. My case study focuses on the process conducted in one village of drafting a constitution for its Village Development Committee in anticipation of the Local Government Act of 2000. That a local community took advantage of such a critical juncture to reassert its own moral order is not surprising; however, that this local moral order explicitly recognises and protects ethnic diversity runs counter to dominant narratives about Africa that equate ethnic diversity with conflict.

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