The Gambia: Moving forward, fear is no longer an option for Gambians

By Mathew K Jallow

A recent Maafanta travel narrative “through my microscope” brought back haunting memories of chilling awareness of the dual tragedies of demoralizing economic deprivation and degrading social antagonism, which betrayed the superficial tranquility of a blundering regime. It was 1989. On the surface, much of what visitors like myself saw, was the pulsating life of an African city seemingly struggling hard to escape its cheerless, if not, downright perverse identity; a city ironically bustling with energy, yet seemingly on the edge of descent into total anarchy and the dreadful confusion of social disorder. It was a city of contradictions; at once sparkling with life and optimism, yet so filled with the tortuous instability of self-doubt. Cotonue, Benin's capital looked much like the antithesis of everything I had learnt about the metaphorically dark African continent. I had never been to that part of the world and to say my experience there was an eye-opener, would be a willful understatement. It was truly frightening, not within the context of fear of physical harm, but by the intolerable low standards of morality.

The sprawling Benin capital was like a place right out of fantasyland; surreal and oppressive to some, but, paradoxically, very much alive even in its loathsome moral bankruptcy. The vicious underbelly of the world of vice in Cotonue was like nothing I had ever seen before; not in Paris, not London, not Oslo, not Belfast and not even the city that never sleeps; New York. And truth be told, I had seen the depressing debauchery of Senegal's promiscuity, but Dakar did not come close to Cotonue's level of lewdness and indulgence in carnal luxuriation. If the people of the Old Testament were to come to life today, Cotonue would easily qualify for the Sodom vice trophy; Sodom as in Sodom and Gomorrah of Old Testament notoriety; that is. Cotonue was truly the epitome of sin city; of the caliber and disrepute of the new desert haunt of Las Vegas. Yet, in-spite of Cotonue's mind-numbing moral infidelity, it was not the heart-breaking ubiquity of street girls that offended the moral conscience; street girls so beautiful even Ethiopia's Iman, America's Tyra Banks and Great Britain's Niomi Campbell would be green with envy.

Cotonue's street girls, who gave the character and color to define the notoriety and splendor of a city, were not the object of popular scorn; Benin's tyrant leader, Mathieu Kerekou, was. But, all this was almost half a century ago. Today, thousands of miles north of Benin, there is a rebirth of a new antediluvian Mathieu Kerekou anti-hero in a place called the “smiling Coast;” but now clearly a misnomer characterization. Since the military regime came to power in 1994, Gambians have seen an intensifying regression into the anachronism of primitive intellectual ignorance. The proscription of thought and free expression in the past has challenged the sanity of our people and bewildered observers of the Gambia's political and governance landscape. In hindsight, my nauseating Cotonue experience of so long ago mirrors a sickening parallel to the Gambia's era of unrelenting political savagery. Yahya Jammeh's pauperization of our country has given rise to Gambia's emerging reputation as a notorious hotbed of shocking human rights abuses; creating and amplifying Gambia's pervasive moral decadence and unnerving economic blight. Like the twerp Mathieu Kerekou, Gambia's idol venerating Yahya Jammeh is a creature of the arrogance of unchecked power; habitually projecting deadly and oppressive force, like the rulers of antiquity.

In a recent move that shocked Gambians, the arrogant decision to alter the work-week was widely condemned for its unilateralism and the adverse effect it will bring to bear on the barely stuttering economy. The impact of the four-day work week to the St. Mary's economy will be devastating to say the least. Crucially too, it is Banjul and the sprawling Royal Albert Market economies that will come down as primary casualties of this dumb and irrational move. This subjective policy declaration is a critical character witness to the disastrous singularity with which an entire national bureaucracy has been run for nearly two decades. The rapid world-wide rejection of the four-day work week is an unequivocal demonstration that Gambians have reached the breaking-point in their tolerance of the arbitrariness of decision-making by the Gambian regime. The exponents of political change are increasingly more poignant in their resistance and the echo of their rejection of the crudeness of the Banjul regime is reverberating to the protests music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the rocking, social anthems of Steppenwolf.

The history of the past eighteen years has highlighted the plasticity of faith, ethics and morals in the Gambia. Over and over again, religion has been powerless in interrogation and mitigating the intensifying abuses of power; on the contrary, the relentless corruption of deep religious beliefs has witnessed a bloodcurdling parallel decline in ethics and morality in Gambian society. It is as if religious advocacy has become meaningless in the face of the unchallenged catalogue of state sanctioned atrocities. Over the past several years, many individuals of reputation, but also of no significant recognition outside their small communities, have been killed through extrajudicial executions by firing squads; staged and faked vehicular accidents; point-blank shooting deaths; the use of strangulation and neck-breaking; and the fatal tortures. Significant also are other criminal cases with broad social dimensions and their significance to the culture of intolerance of the criminal injustice and unjust policy regulations. Gambians detachment and numbness towards Yahya Jammeh's criminality is manifesting in his successes in breaking our collective national resolve against his tyrannical rule.

While such other example cases are plentiful, what jumps out like a neon light are the recent Mile Two Prison executions; the massacre of forty-four Ghanians; the gunning down of sixteen protesting school children; the deadly fear of calling Yahya Jammeh's name in public; the massive displays of Yahya Jammeh's posters all around the country; the closures of radios, newspapers and the blocking of electronic media; Yahya Jammeh's heavily militarized battle-front convoys; the massive number of police and military check-points around the country; the “false information law” used extensively to silence Gambians; the unilateral decisions to change entrenched labor laws; the coercion and use of Gambians in slave farm labor; the intrusion into and hijacking of Islam in particular; the naming of public institutions after his family members; and finally, the conspicuous tribalization of the civil service and other areas of private endeavor; in order to advance a political agenda. These cases are seminal in articulating Yahya Jammeh's political toxicity, and while a small cadre of enforcers and enablers continue to terrorize Gambians, the grip on power is slipping away gradually regardless of the intimidation. Moving forward, fear is no longer an option for Gambians.

Mathew K Jallow, writer, journalist, human right advocate and political activist, a critic of the Gambia's military regime under Yahya Jammeh has been in exile in the US for more than a decade.

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