The neighbourhoods of Banjul South

Half Die, on the sand spit at the south-eastern fringe of the island, was earlier called Mocam Town (also Moka Town or Wildman Town). Its name is traditionally traced to catastrophic mortality — the 1837 yellow fever outbreak or, most commonly, the 1869 cholera epidemic in which about 1,162 of roughly 4,000 Bathurst residents died. One account traces the phrase to an exchange between Lieutenant Governor George Rendall and the colonial surgeon in 1837.

• Half Die

Half Die emerged as a village of migrant workers during Alexander Grant's tenure as Commandant and housed the town's poorer residents through the colonial period, flooding repeatedly in the rains. Today it holds the Banjul Ferry Terminal and remains a named electoral ward. The Standard newspaper has campaigned to preserve Half Die as, in its words, the soul of Banjul.

• Half Die

Half Die was included in the Bathurst South parliamentary constituency in 1966, and from the 1950s to the 1970s it was an electoral stronghold of the Bathurst politician Ibrahima Muhammadu Garba-Jahumpa. The ward still votes as Half Die today — the neighbourhood's name has outlived the empire that caused it.

• Half Die
• Banjul South

Soldier Town grew around the garrison's barracks and took its name from the soldiers settled there — pensioners of the West Indian Regiments and the Royal Africa Corps, and liberated-African units stationed from 1827. After disease killed nearly every British soldier posted to Bathurst, Soldier Town became a predominantly African neighbourhood. The name survives in community usage though it is not a mapped place name in OpenStreetMap today.

• Soldier Town

Jollof Town was settled by Wolof artisans and mechanics, many connected to the Saint-Louis trading world of Senegal, and its name references the Wolof (Jolof) people. One preservation study instead describes a quarter named for Jola labourers who helped build the city — the similar names appear conflated across sources, so the exact naming story is marked contested. What is consistent: a Wolof-identified artisan quarter existed from Bathurst's early decades, and Wolof became the city's everyday language.

• Jollof Town
• Wolof
• Jola

Portuguese Town was named for families of mixed African and Portuguese descent — heirs of the centuries of Luso-African river trade that preceded the British settlement. In the 1820s–1840s, liberated Africans arriving via Sierra Leone, some from as far away as the West Indies, also settled heavily in this quarter.

• Portuguese Town
• Aku

One published account of Bathurst's quarters records a Melville Town occupied by the Aku after earlier Jola settlement. We have found no second independent source for this quarter's name or boundaries, so it is flagged single-source pending confirmation from colonial maps or Florence Mahoney's published work. If your family remembers Melville Town, your account is exactly what this archive needs.

• Melville Town
• Aku
• Jola

Albert Market — formally Royal Albert Market — was built in the mid-nineteenth century on what was then Wellington Street (now Liberation Avenue) and named for Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort. It has been Banjul's commercial heart ever since, a depot and meeting place for traders from the whole region. A fire destroyed the market in 1988 and it was rebuilt shortly afterwards.

• Albert Market
• Liberation Avenue

Market life in Banjul spreads from the July 22 Square area eastward along Russell Street to Albert Market and the wharves. This river-facing corridor — docks, warehouses, ferry, market — is the working spine that Banjul South's households historically fed and were fed by.

• Albert Market
• Russell Street
• Half Die

Box Bar Stadium, on Box Bar Road (also recorded as Wallace Cole Road), was the home ground of the national football team before Independence Stadium opened, and hosted the Gambian Cup. Generations of Banjulians watched football there; the grounds also host cultural events, including Kankurang appearances in initiation seasons.

• Box Bar Road

The foundation stone of St Mary's was laid on 6 January 1900 by Governor Robert Llewelyn, and the church was consecrated on 21 December 1901 by Bishop Taylor-Smith — its name honouring the island's patron saint. It is the seat of the Anglican Diocese of Gambia in the Church of the Province of West Africa, with a capacity of about 450.

• Banjul

King Fahad Mosque on Independence Drive — also called Banjul Central Mosque — was built in 1988 and is the largest mosque in the city, with reported capacity around 6,000 worshippers. Its minarets dominate the skyline south of Arch 22. The smaller Half Die Mosque on Cherno Adama Bah Street anchors worship in Banjul South itself.

• Independence Drive
• Half Die

Banjul's south and west edges meet the Tanbi Wetland Complex — about 6,000 hectares of estuarine wetland, most of it mangrove, designated a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance in 1996. Livelihoods there include shrimp fishing, rice cultivation, and a distinctive women's oyster economy in the mangrove creeks. The ferry terminal and fishing wharf at Half Die tie Banjul South directly to this river economy.

• Tanbi Wetlands
• Half Die

Jola women have long harvested, roasted, and sold mangrove oysters from the Tanbi creeks. In 2012 the Government of The Gambia granted the TRY Oyster Women's Association exclusive use rights to the cockle and oyster fishery in the Tanbi Wetlands National Park — reported as the first time in sub-Saharan Africa that a women's association received exclusive fishery rights from a national government.

• Tanbi Wetlands
• Jola

Dobson Street is one of the surviving colonial-grid street names in central-south Banjul, mapped in OpenStreetMap as a residential street. Published history specific to Dobson Street is thin in accessible sources — which makes it a perfect example of what this archive exists to capture: the street's own residents hold its record.

• Dobson Street