Author: Patrick

One of the first detailed accounts was left by French nobleman Nicolas Villault de Bellefond. He sailed as comptroller of the 400-ton frigate Europa in 1666-1667, sponsored by the French West Indian Company.

In the midst of trade negotiations, the local people began running “Pell-mell” from their houses and abandoned their merchandise. It turned out, that they were rushing to welcome their ruler, Falam Boure, and his entourage. The thaba or ruler wore a blue robe while the men of his entourage were dressed in blue-and-white striped gowns.

Villault estimated the local ruler’s age to be above 60 years and described him as “grave and venerable” at one point and “sensible and majestick” at another. Falam Boure told his guest in Portuguese it had been four years since any “Whites” had visited.

Footnote: Villault, 1670, pp. 57-59.

Dutch merchant William Bosman described the inhabitants of Cape Mount in the early 1700s as “industrious to the last degree,” mainly in growing rice and extracting salt from sea water.

At Cape Mount around 1701, the men’s attire was “like a Surplice,” which was a knee-length overgarment with full sleeves worn by European clergy or choirs. Women, on the other hand, wore a narrow cloth around their waist, “tucked in at their sides to fasten it,” but without the girdles worn by women on the Gold Coast

“Sometimes they shamelessly go around naked,” he added, “as if they were proud of what Nature bestows on them in common with the rest of their Sex.”

Footnote: Bosman, 1967, pp. 474, 472, 480-481.

Samuel Brun of Basel, Switzerland, left one of the earliest descriptions of local culture and people in 1611 and 1620. Living among the Vai in 1620 were several Dutch sailors, survivors of a ship wreck one year before.

According to Brun, “Flamore,” the thaba or monarch, spoke French. The thaba’s wife (whom the Dutch called Maria) was a native of Cameroon and spoke “good Dutch.” She had come to Cape Mount with a Dutch trader, who had taught her his native tongue.

Throughout the 1600s, Cape Mount is said to have been ruled by men with similar names. Their names were written as “Faramborey,” “Faran Bure,” “Frambore,” “Flambourre,” and “Falam Bûrre.” All of these suggest the family whose name is now spelled “Fahnbulleh.” 

Footnote: Brun, 1983, pp. 74-75, n. 185; Sieur de Bellefond Nicolas Villault, “A relation of the coast of Africa called Guinea,” in John Green, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 2 (London: Thomas Astley, 1745-47), pp. 382-383; Villault, 1745-47, p. 379; Barbot, 1732, p. 108.

One of the first French vessels to reach this region was piloted by a Portuguese renegade Joåo Afonso (also known as Jean Alfonce), who traded for gold and ivory at Cape Mount and the Junk River in 1533.

Next to enter the fray were the Dutch, who sent a fleet to Sierra Leone in 1626. They accidentally brought cholera or the “bloody flux,” blamed for killing “multitudes” after “they have lost all their blood.” This outbreak was followed soon after by the measles, which “swept away the best part of the people” (due probably to a lack of immunity).

Footnote: P. E. H. Hair, “Some minor sources for Guinea, 1519-1559: Enciso and Alfonce/Fonteneau,” History in Africa, Vol. 3 (1976), pp. 19-46, especially pp. 30-31; P. E. H. Hair, “Some French sources on Upper Guinea, 1540-1575,” Bulletin de l’Institute francais d’Afrique noire, Série B, t, 31, no. 4 (1969): 1030-1034.Barbot, 1732, p. 118; Hair, 1974, pp. 25-54.

The next immigrants to Cape Mount were the Gola, who met the Dey and Vai. Also living here were the Kuwaa (Belle) and Bassa, cousins of the Dey. In what is now known as Bomi, the Gola established towns known as Zoodi, Todien and Sugbulum (on the current Bomi Hills road).

Some Gola moved further south, where they placed themselves under the protection of their old trading partners, the Vai and Dei in Kone, Cape Mount. When the Mende arrived near Cape Mount, there was already a Gola-Vai hybrid clan living in the area.

Footnote:  d’Azevedo, 1959, pp. 53-54, 57, 63; Bureau of Folkways, 1955, p. 53.Oglivy, 1670, p. 381; for oral traditions, see Germain, 1984, p. 67; Johnson, 1961; Person, 1961.

Oral traditions confirm the accounts in the Quoia document of people moving into the forest of present-day Liberia.

A careful comparison of traditions from different ethnic groups provides an outline of the basic order in which various groups moved.

Fortunately, several early European documents provide rough dates for when these movements occurred. They would have been sometime between the Mane invasion around 1560 and well before 1651.

Footnote: Fage, 1994, pp. xi.

An invasion near Cape Mount — and the political unit it created — were recorded by Dutch geographer Olfert Dapper. They were included in a book he published in 1668.

Dapper began his description of societies in present-day Liberia with a “Kingdom” called Quoia. The origin of the “Quoia” name is not explicitly addressed by Dapper’s informant. However, it is worth noting how similar it is to Quoja, the Vai word for “bushcow,” suggesting an oblique reference to the invaders’ origin in the direction of the forest.

Footnote: John D. Fage, A Guide to Original Sources in Precolonial Western Africa Published in European Languages, for the Most Part in Book Form (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison,1994), pp. xi; Hallett, 1965, p. 67; P. E. H. Hair, “Barbot, Dapper, Davity: A Critique of Sources of Sierra Leone and Cape Mount,” History of Africa. 1 (1974): 25-54, especially pp. 33-39; P. E. H. Hair, “An early seventeenth-century vocabulary of Vai,” African Studies, 23, 3-4 (1964): 129-139.

The first written records on the area now known as Cape Mount were left by Portuguese navigators who started arriving in the mid-1400s.

A Venetian mariner gave an Italian name to one of the first points visited in present-day Liberia: Capo del Monte (for “chief mountain”). This came to be rendered as Cape Mount in English. Others would map this coast and give names to many of its features. They named geographical features like “Cape Palmas” and such rivers as “St. Paul’s” and “St. John’s.”

Footnote: Rodney, 1980, p. 193; Davis, 1976, p. 2; Periera, 1937, pp. 108; J. D. Fage, “A commentary on Duarte Pacheco Pereira’s account of the Lower Guinea coastlands in his Esmeralda de Situ Orbis and on some other early accounts,” History in Africa, 7 (1980), p. 50. On Duarte Pacheco Pereira, see Masonen, 2000, pp. 148-152.

Vai oral histories suggest multiple migrations from the Sahel. One story suggests the Vai emerged from among supporters of Sumanguro defeated by Sundiata in 1235.

Another tradition traced the group’s origin to an expedition sent by the Mali empire in 1300 AD. A third claims the Vai descended from the son of a Malinké ruler who was expelled from Musadu at an unknown date. A  fourth points to the Kamara family from Mali, who arrived around 1550.

Footnote: Massing, 1985, pp. 36-38; Ellis, 1914, pp. 27-28; Fairhead, 2008; Person, 1968, p. 242; Person, 1987, p. 249; Geysbeek, 2002; Korvah, 1960, pp. 31, 33; Korvah, 1995; Jones, 1987; Fairhead, Geysbeek, Holsoe and Leach, 2003, p. 136.

Various Mande groups in western Liberia all say they were preceded by the Vai. The Vai say their Dyula ancestors were drawn to this area by the Gola salt trade. According to the Dei, the Vai first entered Gola territory, but the Gola pushed them toward the coast near the Dei.

Oral traditions of the Vai, Gola and Dei  point to intermarriages being common between the three groups. But, the Dyula language could only have survived if the first group of Dyula immigrants had included a large number of women. After all, it is mainly women who pass the “mother tongue” from one generation to another.

Footnote: Bureau of Folkways, 1955, p. 58; Andah, 1992, p. 268.

Several routes linked the Niger to the salt-producing coast as well as the kola forest of Sierra Leone and Liberia. All of those routes passed through Kankan, which was the main transit point between the Buré gold-working region and forest societies on the one hand and the Sahel on the other.

One route went from the Niger through Kankan to the Sierra Leone peninsula. The Dyula ancestors of the Vai ethnic group took this route to the Sierra Leone peninsula before slowly gravitating toward Cape Mount. A second path ran from Kankan to Musadu to Bopolu to Jondu to Gowolo to Gowolonamalo to Cape Mount.

Footnote: Massing, 1985, pp. 36-37, 41; George E. Brooks, Kola Trade and State Building: Upper Guinea Coast and Senegambia, 15th and 17th Centuries (Boston, MA: Boston University, African Studies Center, 1980), p. 268; Person, 1968, p. 558; Beávogui, 2001, p. 54.

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.