Where does the name “Senegal” come from?
Origin · Fleuve Sénégal
Around 1446, a mixed-race man named Denis Fernandez is said to have landed at the river mouth and asked fishermen for its name. Pointing at their boats, they are said to have answered “sunu gaal” — “our pirogue”, in Wolof. This anecdote, told by Abbé David Boilat in his Esquisses sénégalaises (1853), became the most popular legend about the origin of the name “Senegal”: it appeals because it evokes a country where everyone sails in the same boat. But since the 1960s, the historians Raymond Mauny and Théodore Monod have challenged it. For them, the name more likely comes from the Zenaga (also called Sanhaja), a Berber tribe of the Sahara already mentioned under that name on the first Portuguese maps of the region. To this day, neither hypothesis has been definitively settled.