BAGA

people who inhabit the swampy coastal region between Cape Verga and the city of Conakry in Guinea. They speak a language of the Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo family. The women cultivate rice; the men fish and tend palm and kola trees. Some Baga are employed as wage labourers in the bauxite mines of the Los Islands off Conakry. Houses are typically cylindrical mud structures with thatched-straw roofs, grouped in compounds that may adjoin to form small villages. There is little formal political organization, authority traditionally having been wielded by petty paramount chiefs. Although most Baga are Muslim, it is thought that some remote groups along the Nunez and Pongo rivers have remained animist. The dead are exposed, before burial, in a sacred grove; their houses and certain possessions are burned.