[27] Their music and literary traditions are preserved by a caste of griots, known locally as jalolu (singular, jali), as well as guilds and brotherhoods like the donso (hunters).

[28] Between the 16th and 19th centuries, many Muslim and non-Muslim Mandinka people, along with numerous other African ethnic groups, were captured, enslaved and shipped to the Americas.

Mande hunters founded communities in Manden, which would become the political and cultural center of the Mandinka,[30] but also in Bambuk and the Senegal river valley.

[citation needed] Manden was famous for the large number of animals and game that it sheltered, as well as its dense vegetation, so was a very popular hunting ground.

[35] With the migration, many gold artisans and metal working Mandinka smiths settled along the coast and in the hilly Fouta Djallon and plateau areas of West Africa.

Their presence and products attracted Mandika merchants and brought trading caravans from north Africa and the eastern Sahel, states Toby Green – a professor of African History and Culture.

Shihab al-Umari, the Arabic historian, described his visit and stated that Musa built mosques in his kingdom, established Islamic prayers and took back Maliki school of Sunni jurists with him.

One of the legends among the Mandingo of western Africa is that the general Tiramakhan Traore led the migration, because people in Mali had converted to Islam and he did not want to.

[37] The Traore's marriage with a Muhammad's granddaughter, states Toby Green, is fanciful, but these conflicting oral histories suggest that Islam had arrived well before the 13th century and had a complex interaction with the Mandinka people.

[40] Slave raiding, capture and trading in the Mandinka regions may have existed in significant numbers before the European colonial era,[33] as is evidenced in the memoirs of the 14th century Moroccan traveller and Islamic historian Ibn Battuta.

[43] According to Toby Green, selling slaves along with gold was already a significant part of the trans-Saharan caravan trade across the Sahel between West Africa and the Middle East after the 13th century.

[45] With the arrival of Portuguese explorers in Africa as they looked for a sea route to India, the European purchase of slaves had begun.

[46] In parallel with the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the institution of slavery and slave-trading of West Africans into the Mediterranean region and inside Africa continued as a historic normal practice.

Slavery was already an accepted practice before the 15th century, when most enslaved people were taken on routes to North Africa and western Asia by Arab traders.

As the demand grew, states Barry, Futa Jallon, led by an Islamic military theocracy, became one of the centers of this slavery-perpetuating violence.

[51] The historian Walter Rodney states that Mandinka and other ethnic groups already held slaves who had inherited slavery by birth, and who could be sold.

[53] These jihads captured the highest number of slaves to sell to Portuguese traders at the ports controlled by Mandinka people.

[48] The insecure ethnic groups, states Rodney, stopped working productively and tried to withdraw for security, which made their social and economic conditions more desperate.

[52] Walter Hawthorne (a professor of African History) states that the Barry and Rodney explanation was not universally true for all of Senegambia and Guinea, where high concentrations of Mandinka people have traditionally lived.

[54] In the 21st century, the Mandinka continue as rural subsistence farmers who rely on peanuts, rice, millet, maize, and small-scale husbandry for their livelihood.

Small mud houses with conical thatch or tin roofs make up their villages, which are organised on the basis of clan groups.

While farming is the predominant profession among the Mandinka, men also work as tailors, butchers, taxi drivers, woodworkers, metalworkers, soldiers, nurses, and extension workers for aid agencies.

Marabouts, who have Islamic training, write Qur'anic verses on slips of paper and sew them into leather pouches (talisman); these are worn as protective amulets.

As in other locales, these Muslims have continued some of their pre-Islamic religious practices as well, such as their annual rain ceremony and "sacrifice of the black bull" to their past deities.

Mandinka villages are fairly autonomous and self-ruled, being led by a council of upper-class elders and a chief who functions as a first among equals.

The enslaved strata included labor providers to the farmers, as well as leather workers, pottery makers, metal smiths, griots, and others.

[24] The Mandinka Muslim clerics and scribes have traditionally been considered a separate occupational caste called Jakhanke, with their Islamic roots traceable to about the 13th century.

[66] In 2010, after community efforts of UNICEF and the local government bodies, several Mandinka women's organization pledged to abandon the female genital mutilation practices.

In rural areas, the influence of western education is minimal; the literacy rate in Latin script among these Mandinka is quite low.

The kora is a twenty-one-stringed West African harp made from a halved, dried, hollowed-out gourd covered with cow or goat skin.