Adventures in The Gambia, A Marconi Engineer Retells Pre-1981 Coup Tale
By CLIVE WARNER, Monterrey Mexico
Fula acrobats taken by Clive Warner, 1980-81.
I arrived in The Gambia in 1980, probably in November, because the weather was sunny and dry, and it was before Christmas. (I’d have to dig up an old passport to be certain.)
We checked in to a hotel on the strip, the African Village. I was delighted by my room, which looked out over the Atlantic with the beach directly below. It seemed to us that we were living in an idyll, but getting paid for it at the same time.
Warner @ Bonto Station fixing transmitters
The following day we met Amu Jobe, the Chief Engineer of Radio Gambia at the time. He arranged for us to make our first trip to the site of the transmitters at Bonto village, which at that time was equipped with a pair of Marconi 10KW medium-frequency (AM) transmitters. Programmes came from The Radio Gambia Mile 7 Studios near Banjul.
Our job in The Gambia was to install and commission a second pair of Marconi 10KW transmitters at Bonto, operating on a second frequency. To do this we had to install some rather complicated radio-frequency combining and filtering cabinets, in the aerial field. In addition, we would perform a similar task at Basse, except the Basse transmitters were 1KW units rather than 10KW.
The whole job was supposed to take possibly eight weeks or so. When I went into the aerial field at Bonto, it was overgrown with grass almost to my own height. I was following a narrow path through the grass when a large snake confronted me. Carefully, I backed away until I could make a run for it, and then I insisted that all the grass should be cut before I would venture into that field again.
On my second inspection I saw a watermark more than a meter up the antenna mast, and asked why? The staff informed me that the nearby river flooded the aerial field every rainy season. I realized that we were faced with considerably more engineering than we’d expected; to raise the two large combiner cabinets sufficiently high to avoid damage from flood water involved designing and pouring two large concrete foundation blocks.
Radio Gambia engineers @ Bonto station, 1980-81
Unfortunately, I do not recall the names of any of the transmitter staff at Radio Gambia apart from one, Samba, who was the general do-it-all guy. Samba was quite a character. One day he gave me a fright by firing his old shotgun right outside were I was working in the transmitter room. He held up a brightly coloured parrot by its legs. I declined his invitation to eat some of it. Later I discovered just the feet, standing near the door with the rest of the body missing.
We had many adventures in The Gambia, including rescuing a young British guy and his girl from the middle of The Gambia River late at night; they were being swept out to sea, their fishing dugout having run out of fuel. Not to mention finding one of my friends and neighbours, a W.H.O. doctor, dead on the steps of my hotel, and later, encountering his ghost. And then there was the young American man we met, who wasn’t a tourist – he stayed for months – without any apparent job or means of support, and decided to accompany us upriver on the boat to Basse “to take a look around”. To this day, I’m convinced he was a CIA operative. I’ll save those stories for my memoirs.
In May 1981, Tim and I were having a quiet drink in a bar near our hotel when a Gambian guy, who seemed to have had a few drinks, began talking to us about a “revolution” that would soon take place. In this revolution, he told us, President Jawara, who he told us was nothing but a parasite, would be thrown out and a “people’s government” would take over.
Of course, both Tim and I thought this was quite preposterous – just another drunken guy with a fantasy. But then, sensing our disbelief, the man pulled an envelope from his pocket and drew from it a letter, saying, “So, you no believe me, heh? Here is de proof!”
I read the letter with great interest. I have no doubt it was genuine. The letter was from Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi, and was all about the overthrow of President Jawara, finishing with a line, “We will support our revolutionary brothers in The Gambia in their overthrow of the tyrant Jawara,” or similar words. It carried his signature.
Tim and I discussed this and decided that we should do something about it but what? The mysterious American had vanished from the scene; we thought that our next best choice would be to find the British paramilitary “advisers” who we had occasionally encountered in our travels. These were two or three British men attached to Jawara’s government to assist him with matters involving law and order.
We managed to arrange a meeting with two of them, and told them about our mysterious plotter and his letter from President Ghaddafi. Unfortunately they had an attitude of ‘we’ve got everything under control, thanks, lads, haha’ and didn’t seem to bother. Meanwhile, we began hearing gossip about an impending coup from our own contacts in the community, such as the hotel owners and local businessmen.
In June, Tim and I finished commissioning the new transmitters and left for England. On July 31 the attempted coup took place, and of course our new radio installations were one of the targets that were taken over, and then shot-up by the Senegal armed forces. (They should have called us at Marconi; it would have been simple to take the radio station off the air without having to destroy it.)
Editor’s Note: Clive Warner is a British engineer who had travelled widely and had stayed long in Nigeria before he came to The Gambia as a Marconi Engineer. He now teaches science in Monterrey, Mexico. In our phone conversation, Clive told me so many fascinating stories about his yearlong stay in The Gambia. He remembers Femi Jeng and the iconic commentator Saul Njie as well as the music shows that the Mile 7 Studios were noted for.