The Niominka people (also called Niuminka or Nyominka) are an ethnic group in Senegal living on the islands of the Saloum River delta.
[2] A supplementary theory suggests they were not a distinctive people, but rather just a disparate collection of indeterminate aboriginal riverine inhabitants and migrants, refugees and fugitives from neighboring Mandinka and Serer states that flocked to that relatively inaccessible and ungoverned delta corner, and eked out a largely independent existence.
The nominal overlordship of the Niominka seems to have flipped back and forth between the Mandinka mansa of Barra to the south and the Serer king of Saloum to the north.
The Niominka are believed to have been the only traditionally aquacultural people on the stretch of the west African coast south of Cape Vert and north of the Bissagos.
[6] Tristão had ventured up the Diombos river on a longboat with his crew intending to find a native settlement to raid, when the Portuguese were trapped by Niominka canoes and massacred.
In his own (unreliable) memoirs, Portuguese captain Diogo Gomes reports he was personally responsible for negotiating a peace treaty c. 1456 (perhaps a little later) with the Niumimansa, and even of baptising him as a Christian.
In the early 1860s, when the peoples of the Gambia area were raised in revolt against the Mandinka aristocracy by the Toucouleur marabout Maba Diakhou Bâ, the Niumi were not immune.