Kanifing · town
Bakau
The 2013 directory separately records Bakau New Town and Bakau Wasulun rather than one undifferentiated Bakau count.
Gathering what this circle has shared so far.
Chapter 01
2013
A census settlement is not an entire community story
GBoS's settlement directory lists named places within regions and districts. It explicitly notes that names may change and that mappers asked residents about original settlement names, a reminder that naming is a social record as well as a statistical code.
Bakau New Town and Bakau Wasulun, Sere Kunda, Tanjeh, Gunjur, Farafenni and Soma appear as distinct records or clusters of records. Their 2013 counts cannot be transferred to 2024, and administrative data alone cannot explain a place's family, language or cultural history.
A familiar name, a remembered voice. What would you add to the story of Bakau?
Add your memoryChapter 02
2013
Bakau is more than one census label
GBoS lists Bakau New Town and Bakau Wasulun separately within Kanifing. An archive search for 'Bakau' can bring them together for discovery while preserving their distinct recorded names.
The government's tourism page names a Bakau craft market. That is useful contemporary orientation, but it does not date the market or establish how craft practice was transmitted within Bakau families.
Chapter 03
2013 census directory
Bakau’s recorded settlement labels
The 2013 GBoS directory records settlement names at a finer grain than a single Bakau label. Search can link those names for discovery, but a living archive should preserve the distinct record names and not manufacture a single present-day population or foundation story from them.
Chapter 04
2007 (photograph), reported 2026
Fisherwomen's work behind the market stall
A 2026 newspaper report describes fisherwomen working across the Gambian small-scale fisheries value chain nationally as traders, processors and smokers, often labouring in smokehouses with deteriorating structures, rusted roofing, no rain protection, and daily exposure to thick smoke without masks or gloves. The report also describes economic pressure from rising fish and salt costs and from industrial fishmeal operations competing for the same small pelagic species that women need for processing.
Bakau's own fish market, photographed in 2007, is one of the country's longstanding landing and trading points where this kind of women's work happens. The report itself does not name Bakau specifically, so this entry links the market as an illustrative site of a documented national pattern, not as direct reporting on Bakau's own working conditions.
Sourced media: Fisherwomen's work behind the market stall
Bakau fish market
The fish market at Bakau, photographed in 2007.
Ralfszn. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source: File: Bakau fishmarket.JPG
Chapter 05
2016-2030 policy
Five languages named in an education policy
The Gambia's education policy proposes strengthening teaching of five commonly used languages as subjects: Wollof, Pulaar, Mandinka, Jola and Sarahule. It also proposes exploring inclusion of Serere and Manjago.
This is a policy aim, not evidence that every school teaches all five or that a speaker's community can be inferred from their address. Oral archive cataloguing should record the language actually spoken in a contribution and preserve a speaker's own naming preference.
Chapter 06
Description accessed 2026; underlying practice and family stewardship undated
Kachikally's family stewardship and Bakau's own quarter name
A tertiary overview citing published Gambia guidebooks and heritage writing identifies the Kachikally pool as privately run, associates it with a family named in that source as long-established Bakau landholders, and notes that Kachikally is also the name of Bakau's central district. This is a tertiary characterisation of ownership and place naming, not a verified land title or genealogical record, and no lineage or ethnicity claim is drawn from the family name here.
The same source estimates roughly eighty crocodiles at the pool and notes it is popularly described as home to Nile crocodiles, although specialists identify the animals as West African crocodiles, a species only formally distinguished from the Nile crocodile in recent decades. An archive entry should keep the informal name in circulation while flagging the scientific correction.
Sourced media: Kachikally's family stewardship and Bakau's own quarter name
A crocodile at Kachikally, Bakau
A West African crocodile at the Kachikally pool, photographed in 2008.
Ikiwaner. CC BY-SA 3.0 · Source: File: Kachikally crocodile.jpg
Chapter 07
Oral tradition recorded in 2009 publication
Katchikally: an attributed tradition and a stewardship boundary
ICCROM’s Gambian chapter records an oral tradition that connects Katchikally in Bakau with a named ancestral encounter and custodianship. This is an attributed account of tradition, not a verifiable date of origin or a license to state what the site means to every Bakau resident.
The same text describes conservation pressures around a sacred natural place. Any public archive entry should therefore ask current custodians what may be recorded, translated, photographed or withheld, rather than treating a published description as blanket permission.
Chapter 08
Precolonial village practice; popular sport in the present
Wrestling's Kafo roots and its modern Kombo arenas
AccessGambia's overview describes traditional Gambian wrestling as a stylised descendant of real combat, in which competitors throw opponents to the ground without striking, slapping, kicking or eye contact. It states that village youth organised into age-based groups called Kafo, that the Kambane Kafo, roughly ages eighteen to twenty-five, produced the strongest wrestlers, and that inter-village matches were traditionally held in the dry season after harvest, when communities had more free time. It also names several historical chiefs, including from Kuntaur, Fuladu West and Georgetown, as wrestlers in their youth, framed as evidence of the sport's social prestige rather than as a claim about any living family.
Wikipedia's Serekunda article separately notes that Gambian wrestling remains a popular sport in the city today. This archive treats the precolonial Kafo material and the present-day Serekunda popularity as two separate, thinly linked observations rather than a continuous institutional history, since neither source traces a direct line between them.
Terranga. There is room for you here.
What does Bakau
mean to you?
A name you remember. A photograph in a drawer. A voice you want the next generation to hear. You do not need a complete history to add something meaningful.
From nearby or far away, in the language that feels like home. New contributions are reviewed with care before they appear.
A place at the table
The Bakau guest book
A greeting from afar. A familiar corner. Someone you remember.
Words from the circle
Community memories and greetings, not independently verified historical findings.
Opening the guest book...