In March 1931, Major R. W. Macklin, Traveling Commissioner for the North Bank Province of British Gambia, gathered information intended to help the colonial government in Bathurst, Gambia's capital city. He sought to establish what would be the “proper native authority” to govern this British West African colony through the practice of indirect rule. “Formerly,” Macklin wrote, “before the establishment of the Protectorate the country was ruled over by kings whom the Wolof termed Bur and Mandinka called mansa.” “Petty kings” assisted these kings. Prior to the imposition of colonial rule, each town was under the control of a “headman” (Wolof, burom-dekk, Mandinka, sateo-tio or alkalo, literally “town-master”). The alkalo could only deal with civil offences while they and the “petty kings” had to refer all decisions to the king for confirmation. In actual practice, matters did not always follow this course, depending to a large extent upon the relative strengths of the mansa, mansanding and sateo-tio (alkalo). But, Macklin noted, when the Gambian River states were split up between the French and British in the late nineteenth century the kings and “petty kings” disappeared (although, as Macklin noted, “a few lingered on in the possession of a few empty honours and titles, but deprived of all power, and were replaced by an entirely new creation, that of the ‘head chief’”). From the 1890s, British administrators replaced local elites with head chiefs who owed their positions to colonial administrators and were not, in all cases, descendants of the former rulers.

Although Macklin's story was written in the twentieth century and did not mention the land-based powers of the mansa, mansanding, and sateo-tio, he speaks to one of the several profound changes that gripped Africa in general and the lower Gambia region in particular over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1816, the year when Great Britain founded Bathurst with the aim of disrupting and ending the Atlantic slave trade, to the 1940s, Gambia went through a period of profound economic and political change.