The Wolof people (UK: /ˈwoʊlɒf/)[4][5] are a West African ethnic group found in northwestern Senegal, the Gambia, and southwestern coastal Mauritania.

[7] The Wolof people, like other West African ethnic groups, historically maintained a rigid, endogamous social stratification that included nobility, clerics, castes, and slaves.

[17] The origins of the Wolof people are obscure, states David Gamble, a professor of anthropology and African studies specializing in Senegambia.

[18] Archeological artifacts have been discovered in Senegal and the Gambia, such as pre-historic pottery, the 8th-century stones, and 14th-century burial mounds, but, states Gamble, these provide no evidence that links them exclusively to the Wolof ethnic group.

[citation needed][19] According to Gamble, this migration likely occurred at the end of 11th century when the Ghana Empire fell to the Muslim armies from Sudan.

[18] The documented history, from 15th-century onwards, is a complex story of the rivalry between powerful families, wars, coups and conquests in Wolof society.

[20] The Jolof or Wolof Empire was a medieval West African state that ruled parts of Senegal and the Gambia from approximately 1350 to 1890.

While only ever consolidated into a single state structure for part of this time, the tradition of governance, caste, and culture of the Wolof dominate the history of north-central Senegal for much of the last 800 years.

Its final demise at the hands of French colonial forces in the 1870s–1890s also marks the beginning of the formation of Senegal as a unified state.

The position of king was held by the Burba Wolof, and the rulers of the other component states owed loyalty and tribute payments to him.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans to regions inhabited by the Wolof, slaves there were either born into slavery or enslaved via purchase or capture in warfare.

[23] The Wolof, know to the Spanish as jelofes wew the first African slaves to arrive to Americas in when a group was landed in 1522 in Hispaniola.

With these firearms, the intensity and violence of Wolof slave raids (and conflicts with other ethnic groups in general) increased.

[23] During the New Imperialism era, the Scramble for Africa saw the majority of African territory, including lands inhabited by the Wolof, fall under European colonial rule.

These new colonial regimes moved to outlaw slavery, and by the 1890s the French authorities in West Africa had largely abolished the institution.

[27] The West African jihads that involved the Wolof and other ethnic groups started early and often inspired by militant reformers such as those of the 15th century.

[8][9][10] Wolofs joined the various competing Sufi Muslim movements in the 20th century, particularly those belonging to the Mouride and Tijaniyyah Islamic brotherhoods.

[36] The Wolof's caste status, states Villalón, is a greater barrier to inter-marriage than is either ethnicity or religion in Senegal.

[33] Slaves were either inherited by birth in the Wolof society, or were kidnapped, purchased as children from desperate parents during difficult times such as famine, or slavery was imposed by the village elders as a punishment for offenses.

At the top were the royal rulers, below them were the regionally or locally dominant noble lineages who controlled territories and collected tribute, and below them were commoner freeborn called the baadoolo or "lacking power".

Tal Tamari, an anthropological researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, suggests that a corollary of the rising slavery system was the development and growth of a caste system among Wolofs by the 15th century, and other ethnic groups of Africa by about the 13th century.

[42] According to Victoria B. Coifman, a professor of Afro-American and African studies, historical evidence suggests that the Wolof people were a matrilineal society before the 14th-century.

[33] The divisions, the endogamy among Wolof castes, social and political groups have persisted into the post-colonial independent Senegal.

According to David Gamble, the historical evidence suggests Wolofs used to live in large settlements priors to the jihad wars and slave raids.

Each compound has either round or square huts made from adobe-like mud-millet stalk walls and thatched roofs with a conical shape.

Social relationships within a village are based on hierarchy, while disputes are typically settled with intermediaries and Muslim tribunals headed by an Islamic judge called a qadi.

[46] While slavery is illegal in contemporary African societies, it was common in the history of Wolof people and among the elite castes.

Religious and political functions have been the domain of men, while women typically keep the household, bring water from their sources such as wells or nearby rivers.