The village of Damantan was founded by the Khalif Alime Fodé Salime Niabaly. He was a great religious leader and village chief, and had two sons: Kramo and Alime Niabaly. He was succeeded in turn by his sons, then by his grandson who has shared the present story with us.

When Leopold Sedar Senghor sought to be elected President of Senegal, he asked for the blessing of the Khalif of Damantan, who told him that he would be president but added the following: "I expect you to let my people live where they are."

The first forest guard of Damantan was Dialla Cissokho who was replaced by Amadou Ba. Their presence enabled a certain Rousane to install a hunting camp in Damantan - its guardian was my uncle Ansou Sané. After that another named Marcel also set up a camp - Aliou Dafé was his guardian. Their clients went out to hunt and killed only the males; since they only wanted the heads, they gave the meat to the population.

That continued for a long time, until an officer of the Republican Guard called Oumar Sambe installed the Republican Guards in Oubadji [at the southern boundary of the National Park at the Guinean border]. They stopped merchants who tried to cross the Park, and one of these people shot Sambe in the leg.

For ten years Oumar Sambe spoke about displacing the village of Damantan, proposing that the population move to the villages of Oubadji or Madina Gounas, and one day they came to Damantan to evacuate the population. But Senghor remembered his meeting with the holy man and instructed that all of the surrounding little villages be merged with Damantan to form a single large village.

The wish of the President was not followed because André Roger Dupuy, the first Director of National Parks, had an argument with a villager named Bamoussa Niabaly. The latter had killed a patas monkey in his field with a sling-shot. Dupuy and Bamoussa quarrelled and the villagers jeered Dupuy. Dupuy had a lot of influence in Senegal - he was very close to Senghor and insisted that the village be displaced.

They placed Mady Cissokho in charge of executing that mission. My grandfather warned him to be careful saying: "We know that we will have to move, but you better behave or you will regret it." But Cissokho did not listen, and after that he lost much of his influence and fell gravely ill.

They held a meeting in Kaolack, and subsequently invited the elders to another in Tambacounda. After that second meeting the Guinean president Sékou Touré agreed to drop his support for the villagers’ case. After the death of the Khalif the government finally acted - that was in 1972. The population was displaced to the site of the new village of Damantan outside of the Park, on the national highway six kilometres from the village of Dialacoto, the present administrative seat of the Municipality.

Using the modest compensation provided by the authorities, the villagers were able to build huts and to plant mango trees at the new site. But they kept the right to return as pilgrims to the old village to visit the tombs of the first Khalif and six other spiritual leaders, and to this end a pilgrimage path was created. The pilgrimage takes place annually in the month of May, with faithful coming from far and wide in the region.