How a garrison island became the capital, 1816 to today.
Banjul began as a treaty. On 23 April 1816, Tumani Bojang, King of Kombo, ceded Banjul Island to a British force under Captain Alexander Grant for an annual payment of 103 iron bars, worth about £25 at the time. The British wanted a garrison at the river mouth to suppress the Atlantic slave trade and a trading post for merchants displaced from Senegal. They renamed the island St. Mary's Island.
The new settlement was briefly called Leopold before being named Bathurst, after Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst, then Britain's Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Grant's expedition numbered 75 men; the early barracks held about 80 soldiers and six cannons, and tidal sluices drained the low town against seawater. The town kept the name Bathurst for 157 years.
Bathurst's streets were laid out in a modified grid and named for British generals of the Battle of Waterloo and for prominent merchants. Grant Street was named in recognition of efforts against the slave trade. Many of those names are still what Banjulians actually say, even where official names have changed — one street can carry two names, one on the sign and one in memory.
Under Grant's command the town grew from roughly 600–700 people in 1818 to about 1,800 by 1826 — with only around 30 Europeans among them. By mid-century Bathurst held about 4,000 residents alongside roughly 190 colonists. From its first decade, Bathurst was an African town under a colonial flag.
Much of Bathurst's early population were liberated Africans — people freed from slave ships by the Royal Navy or resettled from Sierra Leone and across the Atlantic world, beginning in 1818. Between 1832 and 1843, over 4,000 liberated Africans were sent from Sierra Leone to The Gambia; of those sent to Bathurst, more than 1,000 died within a year or two of arrival. Goderich Village was established near Oyster Creek in 1832 to receive them. Their descendants became the Aku community.
In 1869 cholera swept Bathurst and about 1,162 of roughly 4,000 inhabitants died. Gambian historian Hassoum Ceesay has recounted how the dead were buried in mass graves because individual burial became impossible. Together with the 1837 yellow fever outbreak, this catastrophe is remembered in the name of the Half Die neighbourhood.
The Gambia became independent on 18 February 1965 as a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, with Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara as Prime Minister. A referendum that year on becoming a republic won 65.85% support but fell short of the required two-thirds majority. Bathurst was the capital where the transition was staged.
A second referendum passed with 70.45% in favour, and The Gambia became a republic on 24 April 1970, with Jawara as its first President. The five-year gap between independence and republic is itself a story many elders lived through and remember.
On 24 April 1973 — eight years after independence — Bathurst was renamed Banjul, restoring the island's pre-colonial name. Tradition offers two origins for the word: the Mandinka phrase bang julo, 'rope fibre', said to describe fibre gathered on the island, and a legend of Bandjougou, a son of Barafin who fled to the island. Both are traditional accounts rather than documented events.
After independence, key colonial street names were replaced: dock-side Wellington Street became Liberation Avenue, and the road now called Independence Drive carried earlier British names. Yet Gambian press coverage records that successive mayors' renaming efforts never fully took — residents largely kept the old names in daily speech. For an oral archive this matters: a speaker may name the same street either way, and both names are correct.
The monumental arch at the entrance to Banjul commemorates the military coup of 22 July 1994. It is the city's most visible late-twentieth-century landmark and a fixed point in how residents date recent memories — before the coup, after the coup.
Banjul counted 31,301 residents in the 2013 census, down from about 45,000 in 1983; preliminary 2024 census results put the city near 26,000. Families have moved to the mainland Kombo conurbation for space and safety from flooding, and many workers now commute into the capital. This dispersal is precisely why recording the compounds' memories is urgent.
