[1] According to some modern historians, of all the regions of Africa, western Sudan "is the one that has seen the longest development of agriculture, of markets and long-distance trade, and of complex political systems."

It is also the first region "south of the Sahara where African Islam took root and flowered.

The Portuguese first arrived at Senegambia and found that slavery was "well established" in the region, used to "feed the courts of coastal kings as it was used in the medieval empires of the interior."

Between the process of capture, enslavement, and "incorporation into a new community, the slave had neither rights nor any social identity."

As a result, the identity of people who were enslaved "came from membership in a corporate group, usually based on kinship.