The Linger of Waalo: Reconsidering Royal Women in 19th-Century Senegal

In his history of Senegal’s Waalo Kingdom, Boubakar Barry shows that the linger or “first lady” of the kingdom played a crucial political role in the development of the state. As the mother or maternal sister of the ruler of Waalo, she not only governed her own hereditary territories but she also entered into the politics of succession. As “keeper of the meen” or the matrilineage’s possessions, the princesses proved formidable in the pursuit of political power. This paper uses Barry’s treatment of the office of the linger to consider the gendered dynamics of power in pre-colonial Senegambia. Specifically, it examines the office of the linger in relation to recent literature on royal women in pre-colonial African contexts in order to understand how and why female power mattered as French rule came to dominate the internal politics of Waalo in the nineteenth century. This paper focuses on the years 1840-1855, a period dominated by two lingers (Ndyömböt and Ndété Yalla) and that corresponded to the expansion of French imperial interests, which sought to bring Waalo firmly under the control of colonial officials. By reading ethnographic and travel accounts of the era as well as observations by administrative officials, this paper re-evaluates the role of the linger in the fall of Waalo, the first state in West Africa south of the Sahara to loose its sovereignty to French forces. In doing so, this paper posits possible connections between the loss of royal power in Senegal’s countryside and the decline of female entrepreneurial influence in Senegal’s coastal towns.