The Mandinka, or Malinke, are a West African ethnic group found in southern Mali, eastern Guinea and northern Ivory Coast. Numbering about 11 million, they are the largest subgroup of the Mandé peoples and one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, they speak the Mandinka language, one of the Western Manding languages in the Mande language family and the lingua franca in much of West Africa. Over 99% of Mandinka adhere to Islam, they live in rural villages. Their largest urban center is Bamako, the capital of Mali, inhabited by the related Bambara; the Mandinka are the descendants of the Mali Empire, which rose to power in the 13th century under the rule of king Sundiata Keita, who founded an empire that would go on to span a large part of West Africa. They migrated west from the Niger River in search of better agricultural lands and more opportunities for conquest. Nowadays, the Mandinka inhabit the Sahelian region extending from The Gambia and the Casamance region in Senegal to Ivory Coast.

Although widespread, the Mandinka constitute the largest ethnic group only in the countries of Mali and The Gambia. Most Mandinka live in family-related compounds in traditional rural villages, their traditional society has featured stratified castes. Mandinka communities have been autonomous and self-ruled, being led by a chief and group of elders. Mandinka has been an oral society, where mythologies and knowledge are verbally transmitted from one generation to the next, their music and literary traditions are preserved by a caste of griots, known locally as jelis, as well as guilds and brotherhoods like the donso. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, many Muslim and non-Muslim Mandinka people, along with numerous other African ethnic groups, were captured and shipped to the Americas, they intermixed with workers of other ethnicities, creating a Creole culture. The Mandinka people influenced the African heritage of descended peoples now found in Brazil, the Southern United States and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean.

The Mandés were a part of many fragmented kingdoms that formed after the collapse of Ghana empire in the 11th century. During the rule of Sundiata Keita, these kingdoms were consolidated, the Mandinka expanded west from the Niger River basin under Sundiata's general Tiramakhan Traore; this expansion was a part of creating a region of conquest, according to the oral tradition of the Mandinka people. This migration began in the part of the 13th century. Another group of Mandinka people, under Faran Kamara – the son of the king of Tabou – expanded southeast of Mali, while a third group expanded with Fakoli Kourouma. With the migration, many gold artisans and metal working Mandinka smiths settled along the coast and in the hilly Fouta Djallon and plateau areas of West Africa, their presence and products attracted Mandika merchants and brought trading caravans from north Africa and the eastern Sahel, states Toby Green – a professor of African History and Culture. It brought conflicts with other ethnic groups, such as the Wolof people the Jolof Empire.

The caravan trade to North Africa and Middle East brought Islamic people into Mandinka people's original and expanded home region. The Muslim traders sought presence in the host Mandinka community, this initiated proselytizing efforts to convert the Mandinka from their traditional religious beliefs into Islam. In Ghana, for example, the Almoravids had divided its capital into two parts by 1077, one part was Muslim and the other non-Muslim; the Muslim influence from North Africa had arrived in the Mandinka region before this, via Islamic trading diasporas. In 1324, Sultan Mansa Musa who ruled Mali, went on Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan carrying gold. Shihab al-Umari, the Arabic historian, described his visit and stated that Musa built mosques in his kingdom, established Islamic prayers and took back Maliki school of Sunni jurists with him. According to Richard Turner – a professor of African American Religious History, Musa was influential in attracting North African and Middle Eastern Muslims to West Africa.

The Mandinka people of Mali converted early, but those who migrated to the west did not convert and retained their traditional religious rites. One of the legends among the Mandingo of western Africa is that the general Tiramakhan Traore led the migration, because people in Mali had converted to Islam and he did not want to. Another legend gives a contrasting account, states that Traore himself had converted and married Muhammad's grand daughter; the Traore's marriage with a Muhammad's granddaughter, states Toby Green, is fanciful, but these conflicting oral histories suggest that Islam had arrived well before the 13th century and had a complex interaction with the Mandinka people. Through a series of conflicts with the Fula-led jihads under Imamate of Futa Jallon, many Mandinka converted to Islam. In contemporary West Africa, the Mandinka are predominantly Muslim, with a few regions where significant portions of the population are not Muslim, such as Guinea Bissau, where 35 percent of the Mandinka practice Islam, more than 20 percent are Christian, 15 percent follow traditional beliefs.

Slave raiding and trading in the Mandinka regions may have existed in significant numbers before the European colonial era, as is evidenced in the memoirs of the 14th century Moroccan traveller and Islamic historian Ibn Battuta. Slaves were part of the stratified Mandinka people, several Mandinka language words, such as Jong or Jongo refer to slaves. There were fourteen Mandinke kingdoms along the Gambia River in the Senegambia region during the early 19th century, for example, where slaves wer

Rebecca Enonchong is a Cameroonian born technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of AppsTech. She is best known for her work promoting technology in Africa. Enonchong has been a recipient of various awards from organizations such as the World Economic Forum. Forbes listed her as one of the 10 Female Tech Founders To Watch In Africa during 2014. Enonchong was born in Cameroon in 1967, her father was Dr. Henry Ndifor Abi Enonchong, a well-known barrister in Cameroon. While Enonchong was growing up in Cameroon, her father helped create the Federal Cameroon Bar Association and its successor, the Cameroon Bar Association. In her teens, Enonchong moved to the US with her family. While studying, she took up a job selling door-to-door newspaper subscriptions from the age of 15, she became a manager at the same company at the age of 17. Enonchong attended the Catholic University of America, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Science degree in Economics. After finishing her education, Enonchong went on to work for a number of organizations including Inter-American Development Bank and Oracle Corporation.

In 1999, Enonchong founded the company AppsTech, a Bethesda, Maryland-based global provider of enterprise application solutions. AppsTech has customers in over 40 countries. AppsTech opened offices including Enonchong's native Cameroon, she describes the experience as having been difficult and having led to the closure of AppsTech subsidiaries. In 2002, The World Economic Forum of Davos, Switzerland named Enonchong a Global Leader for Tomorrow along with other tech entrepreneurs such as Google co-founder Larry Page and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. In 2013, Enonchong was recognized as a finalist for the African digital woman award. In March 2014, Forbes listed her as one of the ‘10 Female Tech Founders to Watch in Africa’. Enonchong has gained notoriety as one of the more followed sources for African tech news on Twitter, with over 30 thousand followers, her handle, @Africatechie, has become a nickname for Enonchong in IT circles. Enonchong has spent much of her career promoting technology in Africa.

She has carried out the work in both the U. S. and in Africa. She was the founder and Chairperson of the Africa Technology Forum, a non-profit dedicated to helping technology startups in Africa. Enonchong is a member of the board of directors for the Salesforce.com Foundation. She is on the board of VC4Africa, one of the largest online communities in Africa, dedicated to entrepreneurs and investors, she is a member of the UK Department for International Development's Digital Advisory Panel, was involved with the UN’s Women Global Advisory Committee and the United Nations ICT Task Force. Enterprise Africa – African Entrepreneur Award World Economic Forum – Global Leader for Tomorrow Digital Women – African Digital Woman of the Year Finalist WIE - 2013 WIE Africa Power Woman New African - 50 Leading Women in Business in 2013 Black Enterprise – 2014 Women of Power IT News Africa – 10 Africans making waves in technology Forbes – 10 Female Tech Founders To Watch In Africa

The Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives prepares and publishes the United States Code, a consolidation and codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States. The Office was created in 1974. 205, of H. Res. 988, 93rd United States Congress, were enacted by Pub. L. 93–554, 88 Stat. 1777. The counsel is appointed by the Speaker of the House and must prepare, submit to the Committee on the Judiciary one title at a time, a complete compilation and revision of the general and permanent laws of the United States which conforms to the understood policy and purpose of the Congress in the original enactments, with such amendments and corrections as will remove ambiguities and other imperfections both of substance and of form, separately stated, with a view to the enactment of each title as positive law." The counsel takes each Act of Congress that covers more than one subject, makes the revisions indicated to each title of the United States Code.

The counsel regularly reviews the United States Code and proposes new titles to be enacted as positive law. Some proposed titles are updates of U. S. C. titles that were codified as prima facie evidence of the statutory law but have not yet been enacted as positive law. Other proposed titles collect the substance of all existing statutes on a particular subject from across the U. S. C. and the Statutes at Large into a new title. The current counsel, Ralph V. Seep, was appointed by Speaker John Boehner, effective June 2, 2011. Official website