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The Mandingoes are the most numerous race of West Africa, and have spread themselves to a great distance from their original seat, being found all over the valleys of the Gambia, Senegal and Niger."
"His evil destiny willed" that a troop of Mandingoes, accustomed to pillage, should pass that way, who, discovering him unarmed, seized him, shaved his head and chin; and, on the 27th of February, sold him, with his interpreter, to Captain Pyke; and, on the first of March, they were put on board the vessel.
Caillié says: "The Mandingoes would rather go without food part of the day than work in the fields; they pretend that labour would take off their attention to the Koran, which is a very specious excuse for laziness." Like most people in Central Africa, all their hard work is done by the poor slaves.
Their government differs from that of the Mandingoes chiefly in this, that they are more immediately under the influence of Mohammedan laws; for all the chief men, the king excepted, and a large majority of the inhabitants of Bondou, are Mussulmans, and the authority and laws of the Prophet are everywhere looked upon as sacred and decisive.
Near to this village rises the chain erroneously called Kong, which is the general name for mountain amongst the Mandingoes. The names of the villages entered by the travellers, and the incidents of the journey through Bambarra, are of no special interest. The inhabitants are accounted great thieves by the Mandingoes, but are probably not more dishonest than their critics.
In this manner we proceeded until we came within a hundred yards of the gate, when the singing men began a loud song, well calculated to flatter the vanity of the inhabitants, by extolling their known hospitality to strangers and their particular friendship for the Mandingoes.
And Mungo Park says of the Mandingoes, among the inland Africans, that, while they seem to be thieves by nature," one of the first lessons in which the Mandingo women instruct their children is the practice of truth." The only consolation of a mother whose son had been murdered, "was the reflection that the poor boy, in the course of his blameless life, had never told a lie."
In Africa, there are Negro nations, that is, nations of intensely black complexion, as the Jolofs, Mandingoes, and Kafirs, whose features and limbs are as elegant as those of the best European nations.
They are called Mandingoes, I conceive, as having originally migrated from the interior state of Manding, of which some account will hereafter be given.
It is said that the slave-traders taught them to lie and steal, and to sell each other, whenever they could not supply a sufficient number of their neighbors, the simple and pastoral Serreres. The Foulahs live upon the elevated plateaus of Senegambia and around the sources of the Rio Grande. The Mandingoes introduced the Koran among them.
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