After becoming well established in Cape Mount, the Dei were joined by the ancestors of the Vai. The first migration by Vai ancestors from the Sahel region to the coast likely occurred c. 1077 AD. They were possibly supplemented by other immigrants after 1235 and again around 1550.
They settled in a corridor along eastern Sierra Leone, western Liberia and southern Guinea. The belt of Dyula immigrants splintered into three groups: the Kono in the north, the Dama in the middle and the Vai on the coast.
Footnote: Jack Goody, “The Mande and the Akan heartland” (pp. 192-218), in Jan Vansina, Raymond Mauny and L. V. Thomas, The Historian in Tropical Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 175.; Sylvester Corker and Samuel Massaquoi, Lofa County in Historical Perspective (Monrovia: W. V. S. Tubman High School, 1972), pp. 39-59; Adam Jones, “Who are the Vai?” Journal of African History 22 (1981): 159-178, pp. 169-171; Brooks, 1989, p. 32.
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