The Myth of the “Tribe” and The Beginning of Identity Politics in The Gambia 

Ebou Jallow, Baghdad, Iraq 

First let us clear some serious categorical misunderstandings about “tribes” and ethnicity in The Gambia:  Africans in general and Gambians in particular became “tribal” during the first half of the 20^th Century when they learned about themselves and discovered their ethnic identities from European scholars.  Think about it seriously, the concept of “tribe” much more “tribalism” was never a serious cultural characteristic that has any determinate roots in the Gambian past.  It was a crafted ideological tradition that was introduced during the colonial period and perfected by the British imperial policy of “Divide and Rule”.  The variability of both the Mandinka and Wollof cultures means that almost every statement about the them need to be accompanied by a label as to time and place. 

I will illustrate this point by just demonstrating the obvious particulars of everyday life in some Gambian communities.  Take Nuimi as an example, for centuries the two ruling lineages the Sonkos and Jammehs have always claimed ancestry from some other ethnic group other than Mandinka:  The Sonkos claim Fula ancestry and the Jammehs claim to be Sereres by descent. A rather more mundane example is the local griot performance during a naming ceremony or other communal events.  Griots, the traditional custodians of oral history in most Gambian ethnic groups, never celebrate any form of ethnic chauvinism in their lyrics but instead extol the past greatness of some male ancestor and recite family origins.  I think these two phenomena demonstrate something beyond the obvious about ethnic identity in the Gambia. The top taxonomic level for most in the Gambia is not with some “tribe” but the extended family; then class (nobles, slaves, artisan professions, etc) and finally place of nativity in that order.  People who joined a Gambian family either as marital partners or long-term clients become either “Mandinkanized” or “Wolofnized”:  they learn the family history, gained an identity with important ancestors and eventually took on a new identity.  My premise here is that ethnic identity or “tribe” has always been fluid and very permeable. 

Now you might be wondering how Gambians ended up with the identity politics of “tribes” and “tribalism” to a point where all the debates about the subject has subsequently turned visceral and quite ugly.  First, I would like to acknowledge Colonel Sam Sarr’s statement that the first dissidence within the PPP ranks was due to the pervasive perception amongst the Mandinka elites that President Jawara was not “Mandinka enough” owing to his early administration policies perceived to be in favor of the Wollofs.  This is a fact registered by some non-Gambian observers.  However, the Mandinkas who formed the PPP also had a very legitimate concern as correctly narrated by Sulayman Saidy-Khan:  The young Mandinkas in Banjul area actively persuaded Sanjali Bojang to turn his Protectorate Peoples Society (which was mainly concerned with making burial arrangements for provincial Mandinkas who died in the Banjul) into an overt political movement that was capable of protecting the interests of the protectorate peoples who have been seriously marginalized in the Colony (Banjul).  These comments from these two gentlemen are historical facts.  What they both apparently miss in their arguments is that the fault lines where not based on tribe or tribalism but the polarization of Gambian society into Colony and Protectorate by the British, a division which sustained the Mandinka discontent based on real and perceived neglect, and discrimination at the hands of the residents of the Colony who happened to be Wollofs and Akus.  The PPP was created from the beginning to speak for the Protectorate peoples (which happened to be predominantly Mandinka) and translate the inchoate grievances of the Protectorate into political power.  During the period between 1959 and 1962 The Gambia underwent a political transformation characterized by a surging Mandinka ethnic chauvinism led by an urbanized (and I would add Akunized/Wolofnized) Mandinka called David Kwesi Jawara (later known as Dawda Kairaba Jawara) which pledged to end the dominance of the city, to redistribute national resources and employment opportunities in favor of the Mandinkas from the countryside.  The condition for this devastating PPP victory over P.S. Njie’s mostly urban UP was helped by the 1960 Lennox-Boyd Constitution, which allowed for the protectorate’s enfranchisement and the holding of territorial elections.

However, the PPP suffered from an aborted political development as soon as it gained power due to poor organization and the structural reality of the bureaucracy that Jawara inherited from the British between the 1962 and 1972 general elections. Well what really happened?  P.S. Njie lost not only the two Wollof strongholds in Saloum but also in Banjul South, in the very heart of the Colony.  These two elections clearly demonstrate that the PPP, which utilized ethnic chauvinism during the formative moments of the party in order to mobilize the mass enthusiasm and collective discontent at the grassroots level, never played tribal politics in order to win the votes of the Jolas, Wollofs of Saloum and Banjul.  Indeed it was P.S. Njie of U.P., and not the Mandinka elites of the PPP, who first introduced the radioactive element of “tribalism” into Gambian body politic during his bid to regain political control. His move was a political strategy of inducing fear by alienation- what I call the “Nuclear Factor” in Gambian politics: it poisons everything else.  P.S. Njie’s electoral campaign targeted the strategic votes of all the other minority ethnic groups of the countryside by denouncing the PPP as a “tribalist” Mandinka party, an allegation that turned out to be false with serious consequences in Gambian politics.  What P.S. Njie failed to grasp at that point in history was that Jawara has already transformed from a tribal spokesman of the Mandinka people into a head of state of a new nation.  Jawara at that time no longer felt the need of ethnic chauvinism to mobilize support for the PPP but instead adopted a policy of national reconciliation of all Gambia peoples regardless of ethnicity. This policy aborted the earlier PPP enthusiasm to consolidate PPP’s political victory to its logical conclusion of “Mandinkanizing” the Gambia, and hence generating a faction of dissenters within the PPP who accused Jawara of betrayal and not “being Mandinka enough”.   Jawara’s initiative for political unity was genuine but it also has a less than altruistic advantage.  The original leadership of the PPP such as Sanjali Bojang had very modest educational background and entirely no previous experience in governmental or parliamentary procedures.  Jawara had no other choice but to reach out to the Wollofs and Akus of Banjul who dominated the state bureaucracy.  As a result the Banjul Wolofs and Akus were responsible for policy formulation, execution and guidance of the PPP government instead of the PPP party cadres who were predominantly Mandinka by composition. 

By 1968, a number of the PPP leadership were expelled and as a group (Sheriff Sisay, Paul Baldeh, M. C. Kah and Yusupha Samba) formed an opposition party, the Peoples Progressive Alliance, to uphold the principle of collective leadership and commitment to the interests of the countryside which they felt had been abandoned by Jawara.  Once again this group was not “tribalist” in character but was more interested in the redress of past wrongs due to the colonial polarization of the Gambia between Colony and Protectorate.  Ethnic chauvinism proper in the fashion of a Mandinka backlash emerged after Sherrif Mustapha Dibba was entangled in the famous “Butut Scandal” which led to his dismissal as Finance Minister.  Mandinka leaders from Badibou crossed over to the capital and held a meeting at a local cinema to protest against Dibba’s treatment, and the perceived plight of the Mandinkas in general.  A later follow up meeting of Mandinka elders in Gunjur organized by Ablai Fadia went further into the deep end thus triggering, for the second time in Gambian politics after P.S. Njie, a tribal agenda which led to the formation of Sherrif Dibba’s National Convention Party (NCP) in opposition to Jawara’s PPP.   The Gunjur Meeting passed a resolution deploring Jawara’s neglect of the Mandinkas, and demanded the Public Service Commission be replaced by a divisional quota system as a means of making appointments in the civil service. 

Political tension is no alien in the Gambian.  During the colonial era, the fault lines were drawn based on religion between the Christian Akus who were privileged by the British against the Wollof Muslims. In this period the Wollofs were relegated to an inferior status just as Colonel Sarr illustrated earlier in the obvious segregation of graveyards in the Greater Banjul Area.   Politics then was localized within the Colony and the cause of the native residents was then championed by the likes of Alhagie Ousman Jeng, Sheikh Omar Faye, Garba-Jahumpa against the status quo Christian Akus such as the Mahoneys and Rev. J.C. Faye.  The historiography hence clearly shows that Jawara’s reconciliation policy has always been a moral bulwark against any partisan slouch towards identity politics by any faction be it the Banjul Wolofs led by P.S. Njie or Mandinkas led by Sheriff Dibba.  President Jawara, like him or not, shall go down in Gambian history as the man that crafted a national politics of reconciliation, and established a moral framework that transcends all identity politics that ever existed in the Gambia.  Perhaps this is what saved the Gambian republic from a festering ethnic violence.  The political cultures of both these two tribes (Wolof and Mandinka) share this much in common otherwise it would have been almost impossible to overcome the fissures caused by the colonial polarization of the country into Colony and Protectorate.  The Wollofs of Banjul are neither “xenophobic nor tribalist to the core” as asserted by Saul Khan based on Colonel Sarr’s rejoinder- The Banjul Wollofs voted for the PPP against a Wolof opposition party in the first two general elections when the PPP was predominantly Mandinka. On the other hand Saul Khan was historically correct in claiming that the Mandinkas were systematically marginalized and ignored in colonial Banjul, an injustice that led to the formation of the PPP.  Ultimately the vast majority of Mandinkas in the Gambia who have consistently supported President Jawara’s reconciliatory politics for 30 good years are definitely not “tribalist” by any stretch of imagination.