Serer-Niominka
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 10,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Languages | |
| Serer | |
| Religion | |
| Islam, Serer religion, animism |
The Niominka people (also called Niuminka or Nyominka) are an ethnic group in Senegal living on the islands of the Saloum River delta. They are currently classified as a subgroup of the Serer.
The territory of the Niominka is called the Gandoul. Most of the Niominka live in its eleven large villages, which include Niodior, Dionewar, and Falia. They represent a little less than 1% of the population of Senegal.
Being island-dwellers, they participate in both agriculture and aquaculture. The primary agricultural produce is made up of rice, millet, and peanuts. As for the aquaculture, the men fish and the women gather shellfish, although environmental problems have become an aquacultural threat.
The Niominka are also beginning to look into tourism.
The origins of the Niominka are obscure and uncertain. Although currently classified together with the Serer people, their name is drawn from Mandinka, meaning "coastal people" (Niumi = coast, and Nka = men), and were known to have been ruled by a mansa (Mandinka for "king"), suggesting they might have originally been either a Mandinka people that were later "Sererized" by migrants from the north, or conversely, a Serer people that were for some time "Mandinkized" by their neighbors from the south. They were overlooked in the process of the "organization" of the Sine and Saloum kingdoms via the Mandinka Guelowar dynasty in the 14th century. Theories suggest they were originally neither Serer nor Mandinka, but an altogether different people, probably related to the Jola people and speakers of Bak language that inhabited the banks of the Gambia river, until they were pushed from below by the migration of Mandinka from the south and east in the 13th century, only to hit the barrier of migrating Serer people from the north, and as a result ended up squeezed into a corner of the delta, south of the Saloum River. A supplementary theory suggests they were not a distinctive people, but rather just a disparate collection of indeterminate aboriginal riverine inhabitants and migrants, refugees and fugitives from neighboring Mandinka and Serer states that flocked to that relatively inaccessible and ungoverned delta corner, and eked out a largely independent existence.
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