The mainland consists of low lying land, never rising above 500 meters, and coming close only in southeastern Sénégal. Most of the land is savannah, or--furthest north--scrub, but there are bands of forest, or cleared forest turned to farm, along the central and southern coasts beyond the sand, mudflats or mangroves.
The Archipelago of the Bijagos are just off of Guinea-Bissau's indented coast. Hundreds of miles into the Atlantic are the generally mountainous Cape Verde Islands. Unlike the Bijagos, they have sand beaches and, at most, thin forests.
There are seven important coast-flowing rivers. The Sénégal is along its namesake's northern and eastern borders. The Sine and Saloum, seasonal in their upper courses, drain the northern land behind the Sénégal and its feeders. The Gambia performs a similar role to their south, but, unlike them, is thick and navigable far inland. To its south are the Casamance in Sénégal, and, in Guinea-Bissau, the Cacheu and the twin-headed Geba.
No one language is first for a majority of the 14 million people living here. Wolof is spoken natively by nearly one in three, in northwestern Sénégal, and is the lingua franca for urban dwellers and many villagers in the rest of Sénégal, and even on the north bank of the Gambia. Inland in Sénégal, in the Sénégal basin and the upper Casamance, Fulani(4) is the main birth language; over the whole area it accounts for almost one in four. Serer-Sine is taught by mothers to about one in ten in these countries, most of them in west central Sénégal and up the Sine and Saloum rivers.
These three languages are in the Senegambian group. Together they account for nearly two-thirds of the region's first language speakers.
The fourth language is Mandekan(5), accounting for almost three in 20 speakers. They are concentrated in southern Sénégal and eastward into the upper Sénégal river valley.
The remaining two in ten or so people speak a variety of languages, mostly Niger-Congo (specifically Mande or Atlantic) or Portuguese creoles. French is an important second tongue.
There is a clear religious majority: Sunni Moslems are more than eight in ten--a decisive majority in Sénégal and the Gambia, and a substantial minority in Guinea-Bissau. The Islam practiced in Sénégal emphasizes the role of the head of a brotherhood, the mirabout, as an intermediate between the believer and god; this is syncretically heterodox, as is the retention of belief in evil spirits, and rituals to protect against them.
Indiginous beliefs are strongest in Guinea-Bissau. There the beliefs include not only, for example, the traditional attention to spirits and magic to deal with them but also modern invovations. The Kiyang-yang women's movement reinterprets the Balanta god, Nhaala, to serve contemporary non-agist, non-animist values.
The only city with over a million residents is Dakar, built in the mid-19th century as a fort to protect the near-by notorious slave port of Goree Island.
Speakers of the Atlantic and Mande branches of Niger-Congo have been in this are for thousands of years. Wolof gained when when Europeans made contact in the 17th century. Mandekan was the language of the Empire of Mali, which ruled from the Sénégal basin and eastward in the half of the last millenium. It served beyond the coast as a counterweight to French colonial assimilationism. Fulani proably started in this area and spread east over the last millenium.
Islam reached in the 11th century C.E. and gained converts rapidly.
Europeans introduced Christianity. They also became, along with slaves from the mainland, the first people in Cape Verde.
(1) Guiné officially.
(2) Cabo in Portuguese.
(3) Translates to 'green' from Portuguese.
(4) Locally called Pulaar or Pular. Some linguistis call it Fulfulde, a name given to it by speakers further east. Fulani is a Europeanization of the Hausa word for the speakers.
(5) Dialects, sometimes regarded as separate languages, are Mandinka and Manikakan. It has been called Manding or Mandingo.