Where the written and recorded record lives, in Banjul and beyond.
The National Centre for Arts and Culture holds more than 6,000 recorded interviews with elders from The Gambia, Casamance, and Guinea-Bissau — most collected in the 1960s–1980s, many by Dr Bakary Sidibe. The collection began as the Cultural Archives in 1971 and became the Oral History and Antiquities Division in 1974. It is the first stop for cross-checking settlement and family histories heard in Hamanteh recordings.
Since 2013 the NCAC oral archive has been digitized with the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, after storage conditions endangered the tapes; copies are now held both at NCAC in Banjul and at the British Library. The lesson for any Gambian audio collection is blunt: recordings survive only if they are copied, catalogued, and held in more than one place.
The UK National Archives holds the Colonial Office's Gambia records, notably the CO 87 correspondence series and the annual Colonial Reports, documenting Bathurst's administration from 1816 — land, epidemics, liberated-African resettlement, ward formation. The research guide Doing Archival Research in The Gambia maps what survives in Banjul versus London.
UNESCO's 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage names oral traditions and expressions as heritage to be safeguarded with community participation. The Gambia's flagship inscription — the Kankurang rite, listed in 2008 — shows the framework applied to a living Gambian tradition. Hamanteh's consent-first, family-authority model follows the same principle: the community owns its heritage.
The core published history of Banjul runs through a small, checkable bookshelf: Florence Mahoney's Creole Saga and The Liberated Slaves; Hughes and Perfect's A Political History of The Gambia, 1816–1994; Patience Sonko-Godwin's Ethnic Groups of the Senegambia; the open-access thesis Heart of Banjul (Michigan State University); and recent journal work on Bathurst's government, urban space, and liberated Africans. Claims in this heritage section can be traced into those works.
