By Mathew K. Jallow, Associate Editor

The small mission school was surrounded by a rectangular fence of wood posts three meters apart and connected by a chain-link fence to keep cattle, goats and sheep out. The whole compound was about several soccer fields in area, though I never could guess it’s exact size. It stood on land that my father’s older brother, Samba Jallow, gave to a group of Irish missionaries who came looking for a piece of land on which to build a school and a church. In one corner of the compound stood the small chapel close to a large gray building where the white Catholic missionaries, all of them Irish, lived and administered to the sick locals. Today, that old chapel is derelict and decrepit, sad and lonely looking, and a far cry from a time and a moment in the past when as an eight year old boy, I rang the bell to call the small but dedicated congregation of new and very young converts to prayer. Barely a year before I was delegated the responsibility of ringing the church bell; I was just another little cattle herder tied to the land and the village where I was born, and the cattle that were fast becoming my way of life. To a very young Fula boy, there was no greater purpose than to dedicate one’s life to continuing the culture and the traditions of cattle herding around which the entire life of my Fula tribesmen revolved. But, whether I was standing surrounded by our family’s cattle herd high atop the hill overlooking the small dusty village of Sare Gainako that my grandfather Gainako Jallow founded, or wading in knee-deep water through the rice swamps close to our village, I was drawn to the aura and the aroma of the small mission school. Maybe, it was because it was different from anything I had ever seen, or maybe because I was just plain curious about those white people in long white robes and the girdles around their waists that we in typical childhood innocence mistook as tails. Only a year earlier, my father had confided to the priest in charge, Rev. Father James White, that he could not afford to sent both his two older sons to school. He insisted that I had to stay on the land and tend to the cattle, but my mind and my soul were far removed from the hard life of farming and cattle herding. Every opportunity that I had I spent at the school compound, looking, feeling, touching, pushing, pulling, hitting, shaking and smelling things that were foreign to our village. As I explored in typical childlike curiosity, I soon began to develop another sense of being different from the one I was born and growing up in. And slowly, I began to break out of the shell of the small world around my village to which I was inadvertently held captive. The smells, sounds, sights and things I saw at the school began to open a new vista of a world much bigger than the one I knew. Up to that point, I had never traveled a distance longer than five miles from my village, and now curiously enough, the school compound for all intents and purposes had become my second home. I spent more time there chasing animals than I spent at the bantaba where the rest of the kids my age played, wrestled and fetched water to quench the thirst of the elders chatting away under the hot African sun. Whenever the summer sun was baking hot, I sat under the tree shades too, all alone, and watched as flocks of birds flew overhead until they disappeared from view in the distant afternoon haze. I left the shade often to pick up pieces of newspapers lying about or blowing in the wind, partly to clean the schoolyard, but more so, to try to decipher the writing on them. Bits and pieces of newspaper, and the writing on them, mesmerized me, as did of course the pictures of people I saw on them; none of them black like my people. Despite the time spent at the school, my father could not be persuaded to enroll me, yet neither he nor the threats and beatings from some of my older brothers and cousins could keep me out of schoolyard. So, it was not long before the two friends, my father’s older brother and Rev. Father White, hatched a plan to enroll me in school with or without my father’s consent. Today, many years later, as I grow older by the day, thoughts of Sare Gainako, the sleepy village where my life began is never far from my mind. Perhaps this is another phase in life that no one told me about. Call it midlife crisis or whatever term suits best, but having already crossed the half waypoint of my life, I am, like many before me, beginning to feel and sense the vulnerability and mortality of my own being. In my mind’s eye, I often reflect on arduous journey I took through life to get to this point, as though I was reading a movie script, and as though all of it happened only yesterday. The truth is, it is not scripted nor did it all happen yesterday, and more, it is as real. Looking back, I could see the moments I fell and struggled to get up. I could see all the times I was pushed, abandoned and literally left to die as the world continued to revolve with me clinging to it by a threat. I also remember being sick and wondering whether I was going to die or not, and whenever I was down and wondering how I could ever get up again, I always remembered a sad song that the Rev. Father Costello liked to hum around the mission house. The sung was called the story of my life. It is a sad, mournful song that never failed to inspire me. Singing it in hard times gave me the strength to get up and walk again, but more importantly, having journeyed through life and experienced the worst of what a human being is capable of being, I never wish my worst experiences to even my worst enemy. Yet truth be told, my own experiences helped develop in me, a compassion and a passion that has become the purpose driving my every action, my every waking moment. To me, anything that is less than the complete mental and physical liberation of every Gambian will be a life not worth living. The opportunity to live a full, vibrant, productive and happy life is a birthright that no one has the right to take away from anyone else. When I long ago made a promise to come back home to Sare Gainako to finish the unfinished job my fathers left behind, little did I realize that I was also making a promise to The Gambian people. The way I see it, my work, or better still, our work has just begun, and we should never rest until we can leave behind a happy, prosperous and liberated Gambian people when we like all those who preceded us, breath our last breaths. The other day looking at the images of Assan Musa Camara, M.C.Cham, Fisco Conateh, Omar Sey and Babou Ceesay, and saw how gracefully they were aging, I saw my own life flowing before my own eyes. The realization of ones vulnerability, limits and more importantly, the finality of life itself became so real and so inescapable that the desire to leave behind a legacy to be proud has for me become a mission or even an obsession. Our lives on this earth is like leaves on a tree, for even as new leaves are blossoming, the older ones are slowly dying away, and in their places, new leaves will once again sprout. Today, our obligation is to supplant this life of misery and agony our people are being put through with one of hope for a better tomorrow, and we have nothing to lose if we die trying to achieve this goal.

This preceding story of my life of course is a prelude to the story of The Gambia as it is today. It is about how The Gambia’s past meets its present, and how a story that began yesterday, transitioned into today. There are no similarities here between my life and that of what The Gambia has become; only parallels that flow the opposite direction to each other. For as I grow older, I have become much wiser, yet it is doubtful I could ever have attained this level of maturity without the harsh experiences I faced growing up. The Gambia on the other hand is a story right out of a dream; seemingly surreal, yet it is not. The innocence that had been the signature of our country for so long has forever been lost. Today, ours is a very polarized society that pitches us against each other; neighbor against neighbor, co-workers that barely talk to each other, friends torn apart by blind political partisanship, and families once thriving and happy, now broken and devastated by endless deaths and disappearances that no one seems able to solve. But, I remember a different time growing up when we thought this could never happen in our own land; that we were too closely related by friendships and intertribal marriages for anything remotely similar to ever happen within our borders. Now, the hopelessness and helplessness that seems to have taken hold in our country is not what those of us lucky enough to have an education ever expected to see our country degenerate into. The tyranny and misrule that our people live under is ever so often punctuated by a spate of brutal killings, tortures, incarceration and disappearances of our fellow citizens. The challenge today is that every educated Gambian owes it to our people to help free them from the tyranny that has gripped our country and turned our once pristine values on their heads. Now, it is clear and apparent that we have wallowed far too long in our fears and have seemingly accepted defeat even before we could begin the battle. There is no doubt everyone in our country knows that under any imaginable scenario other than the military action taken twelve long years ago, Yahya Jammeh could never dream of ever becoming even an assistant director of anything, much less the head of our government. But, now that the damage has been done, it is our obligation to help in the mental and physical liberation our friends, neighbors and fellow citizens who are vulnerable to the exploitation and abuse of their own government. By the way, we no longer have a functioning government in the true sense of the word; what we have is a tyranny and retail bantaba politics where the one who talks the loudest hijacks the truth no matter what the consequences. So far the only man talking is Yahya Jammeh, and every decision that he makes is the result of political calculation and expediency. Sound public policy is an anathema to the rule by decree to which Jammeh has become addicted and in which he has become entrenched after all these years. As these last elections show, our silent majority is crying out loud for leadership and we have a moral obligation to provide it. There is no doubt whatsoever that we need to breath new life into our body politics, because clearly our people have become numbed to the rhetorical and timid politics that they have so often been exposed to by the opposition over the past few election cycles. The boring and drawn out meetings of a PDOIS/NADD, characterized by their signature rhetorical platitudes that inspire no one, and the timidity of UDP/NRP in not talking to The Gambian people about the deaths and dying, the hidden graves, the nightly disappearances and the tortures of our people is reminiscent of another era, another time and another country not far from The Gambia. A true politician who is inspired by public service and not by any self-serving interests, must be willing to put their lives on the line for the greater good of the people. The other day someone wrote from London suggesting that perhaps it is time that a political party is formed by the Diaspora Gambians to take the Jammeh regime head on. I could not agree more. For me personally, PDOIS/NADD represents a deep and abiding philosophical difference that can only be repaired with a complete repudiation of that party’s socialist agenda. As far as the UDP/NRP alliance is concerned, the concept of forming a union is a sound strategic plan, however, not speaking to the issues that matter most was a serious blunder. As we move forward, there is a realization that we must take on Yahya Jammeh, and drive him back to Cassamance where he comes from. This devil must go, and the sooner we can do it the better. Yahya Jammeh must go, or he better pray that his last moments are not like those of the butcher of Liberia: Samuel Doe.

The other day I was reading a story by the venerable Bijou Peters in which she bemoaned the failures at Gamtel, or is it Gamcel. Because the article came from her, I realize Gamtel/Gamcel is in serious trouble. If the story had come from another source, I might have been somewhat skeptical, but coming from her, it spells doom and gloom at Gamtel/Gamcel. And so now they all fall flat to the ground. The once successful Gamtel, which from the technical perspective was once touted as one of the best-run companies in the West African region, appears to be in a dire situation. With the situation so volatile for civil and Para-civil servants, the management at Gamtel will have no motivation and commitment to their company, knowing fully well they could be booted out unceremoniously tomorrow by the mad and mercurial Jammeh. The over-riding interest of every new management and worker there as in all the other departments and agencies, is to make a quick buck and get the hell out as quickly as Jammeh decides to clean house. It can be safely said that every new appointee to any position in any of Jammeh’s governments will be motivated to dip their hands in the coffers they control, looting our national resource, and potentially taking food from hungry little children all across our country. Jammeh is doing it, so why in the world wouldn’t anyone else do it? Gamtel’s situation is eerily similar to the fate of other companies before it under the First Republic: The Gambia Commercial and Development Bank (GCDB), National Trading Corporation (NTC), Gambia Fish Marketing Board (GFMB) Gambia Produce Marketing Board (GPMB) and many others; all looted of billions of Dalasis, and now exist only in our memories. May the Lord have mercy on Gamtel.

In other matters, it is hard to believe that the Daily Observer is running headlines about Yahya Jammeh curing patients with HIV/Aids and Asthma. I wonder in what world do the people at the Daily Observer live in. When the whole world is chastising Jammeh for his lunatic claims of supernatural powers, the Observer can speak no evil, sees no evil and hears no evil as far as their master Yahya Jammeh is concerned. The firing of Lamin Dibba and Ebrima Jaw is politically motivated, because they rightly doubted Jammeh’s ability to cure anything. But, we will see who will laugh last when all is said and done.

The other day Jammeh again did what he does best, fire government employees without warning. This time it was the Speaker of the House. How in the world should the appointment and firing of the Speaker be Yahya Jammeh’s job? And what is the National Assembly doing about the fact that Jammeh is usurping the authority of that body? We hope, the House will send a message to Jammeh that he is not to interfere in the business of the House. The last Assembly was sleeping at the wheel, as is the Judiciary. Hope these new members will turn things around for once. When I saw the picture of Fatou Jahumpa-Ceesay at the National Assembly, I knew she had arrived. It is what she has been fighting to get all these past years. But, she is all pretty face and no brains, and I for one am not the least impressed.

The more I see pictures of Jammeh purportedly curing patients at the Royal Victoria Hospital, the more convinced like the rest that he is probably suffering some kind of mental breakdown. He seems to have no distinction between reality and delusion. Clearly, Jammeh needs help, but more important, he needs to vacate the State House and relinquish power back to the people. Jammeh recently sent messages of sympathy on the death of former President Ford. That was a nice gesture, for sure, but how many of the families of the people he killed did he send any sympathy cards to? Well Jammeh? By the way, the other day 800 hundred girls benefited from a generous financial award for their education. The only problem is that they were all from the Western Division, Jammeh’s favorite place in the country.

The Waa Juwara defection does not surprise me. Waa is a corrupt sucker who reportedly left a dirty trail of corruption in all the places he served as Commissioner. Untold amounts of money for visas and passports are reportedly gone, money borrowed from businesses and never paid back, cows sold and money split with a certain ex-chief and the list goes on and on. With an enemy like that, things can only be better for the opposition.

Finally, a relative of mine recently returned to the U.S. from The Gambia. That is the good part. The bad part is that she reported that it took her four hours to drive from Kalagi to Jarra Soma, and another two hours to get to Niamina. I remember taking that long for those distances, but that was way back in the sixties when there were no roads in the country. Six hours from Kalagi to Niamina is ridiculous and absurd to even think. But the scary part is that the roads are like that all the way to Koina. The Lord have mercy on us.