The Gambia-The Genesis of Tribal Politics

 

By Lt. Col Samsudeen Sarr 

 

Lt. Colonel Samsudeen Sarr, Ex-Commander Gambia National Army

I first want to wish all Gambians at home and abroad happy holidays. With the Tobaski recently celebrated, this time almost coinciding with Christmas, I think we should as Muslims and Christians in a special gesture of ending the year 2007 and starting 2008 all thank God for his blessings and continue to praise him through sustained prayers for better times in the future. There is no doubt in my mind that there are better times for a future Gambia and Gambians. And with prayers based on genuine faith I believe all our problems individual or collective would be solved. We just have to have that faith in God which by merely taking a sober stock of the everyday events surrounding our past or present existence, especially with regard to how we propose and how he disposes, should make us understand and accept his power over our destiny. But taking that honest stock of our existence is what we are not always good at doing. We are therefore, usually more inclined into lamenting over effects while having little or no desire to look into causes.

To get to my point, I must start with the provocative idea of trying to initiate a positive debate among us aimed at searching for the kind of political system The Gambia should adopt after Jammeh is gone. Certainly Jammeh like Jawara will sooner or later go by means that I believe would be totally out of his expectation or design. Call it the Godly way. But governments like that of Jammeh’s with characteristics of a classic autocracy often collapse as a result of blunders caused by its leadership. Since he wouldn’t heed the warning signs and quit while he still could, I am afraid he is headed to dire straits.

I have been however thinking about this idea since the emergence of the numerous Gambian on-line media where, unlike in the past when none existed, we could now constructively engage each other in political, social, economic and security dialogue that I believe is absolutely necessary for better governance in a future Gambia. In fact, it was really inspirational when I read the well written paper by that Gambian at the Pipe Line Mosque, on Tobaski day, where his brief encounter with ex-President Jawara compelled him/ her to write about what many readers agreed was a brilliant and candid observation. That’s where the Jawara era significantly differed in many ways from the Jammeh era in that for the three or more decades that Sir Dawda ruled The Gambia, online forums providing dissidents the means to criticize his government as they are able to do now were none existence. That had in effect slowed down the awareness level of the Gambian people during the PPP days by drastically curbing the number of critics to the few opposition party militants whose effectiveness within the confines of our narrow borders had minimum impact to the disagreeable policies. I think, that had to some extent contributed to what kept the domestic and international image of President Jawara’s government looking good for so long despite its decadence to the end.

Jawara however, was also a Mandinka whose tribe formed the majority in the country and had always been a factor in making his leadership more tolerable.

Jammeh on the other hand has come at a period when Gambians dissatisfied with his policies could channel their thoughts and ideas through mediums broadly accessible to everybody worldwide, thanks to the information super-highway of the modern times. Through the Internet, Jammeh’s administration is constantly put under the microscope a reality he will obviously detest but will also have to live with to the end. His image as a Gambian leader is also blotted by the fact that he was a military officer categorized among the least educated and most important of all as a member of the Jola tribe-a relatively smaller ethnic group- his style of administration seem to be creating him more enemies among the more dominant tribes than he bargains for.

It is hard or even impossible to avoid the politics of ethnicity in Africa; but when a minority tribal leader takes over a country and tries to impose his will over the majority, the consequence is usually offensive.

Please don’t blame me for going there but to take a positive approach towards reconciling our political differences I found it imperative to go deeper than we are willing to go publicly when it comes to tribe and politics in Africa. Last week while driving from work and listening to the National Public Radio (NPR) F.M. station I heard an interesting report covering the presidential political campaign of Kenya. Kenyans are to elect a President on December 27, 2007. Well, it was not too much of a surprise that the main candidates Kibaki and Odinga had their supporters clearly divided along the usual tribal lines. Kibaki being a kikuyu the predominant tribe that historically had opposed British colonialism and as a result suffered miserably under English rule is being challenged by Odinga from the Luo tribe. The Luos were the third largest tribe that had first allied with the colonialist by perhaps knowing sooner than the others that the Toubabs (whites) were unstoppable in their drive to conquer and occupy. Anyhow, when the reporter started asking simple questions to ordinary voters in the streets as to why they wouldn’t vote for the candidate of the other tribe, no sensible answer was given to indicate that they actually knew what they were voting for. One very stupid answer from one Kikuyu voter was that Lou men are not circumcised by tradition so why should such people lead him. Not a single statement was made referring in any respect to how the British by force of colonialism divided and ruled them for so long that they now hate everything about each other but loved all about the “GREAT MASTERS”. 

In my last paper I lamented how Gambians at home take it as a complement when described as being “Toubab” (white) in character; in Kenya according to sources “Toubabs” are treated as super humans and masters of perfection no matter which tribe is dealing with them. But what can we say? I still don’t know what Africa would do without what the Europeans gave us after wiping out everything our ancestors had built?

After listening to the NPR Kenya report I couldn’t help making some comparison to what tribalism also meant in The Gambia and the logic behind it. Amazingly, being born and raised in a homogenous community like Serrekunda taught me little about how different we were tribally. Mandinkas, Wollofs, Fullas, Jolas, Manjagos and Sereres in Serrekunda had all lived together in an atmosphere of peace and unmitigated normalcy. The common spoken language in the streets was Wollof but that simply helped us to get along better. Unless a particular tribe held a traditional ceremony or festival, or you walked into a compound and found the people communicating in a language different from Wollof you wouldn’t know who was who especially, among the boys. We attended school together, played together, went to the movies together, fought and made peace among our selves and grew up never for once feeling different from each other. The only trivial problem that periodically pitched a negligible few against each other was when Mandinka girls called Wollof girls “Solima”, a derogatory name for uninitiated women (the genital mutilation of females). The Wollof girls by tradition were forbidden to do the genital surgery that made them “solimas”; and they hated the name so much so that several defied their parents and went for the initiation. However, as time went by in the urban community the tradition became less and less appealing to those who practiced it; and in the end I believe, it was halted publicly.

Even at my father’s home where by the nature of his business to manage a viable commercial trucking company he had welcomed all sorts of people to live with the family. I am not just talking about men from different ethnic backgrounds but workers from different nations in the sub-region. I could remember his drivers, mechanics and apprentices from Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Senegal and even Mali coming and leaving all year round. In addition to the diverse mixture of all kinds of people in our lives, my father and his brother who started the company were polygamous in every meaning of the word. My mother was Wollof, but my father’s second wife was Sarahuleh. His brother was married to four women from different tribes, two from the Gambia and two from Senegal. So our home was like a little village in Serrekunda where every condition one needed for experience on human behavior in a social structure was obtainable. It was phenomenal to be able to learn a lot about different human characters at a very early age.

However, as I explained it in my book: Coup D’etat By The Gambia National Army, my upbringing helped me to understand at a very tender age that race, tribe, nationality, religion or even family background do NOT determine who is good or bad, productive or useless, kind or wicked, honest or dishonest as most people narrowed down by prejudice tend to believe and dangerously propagate. I think the concept of prejudice merely keeps us irrational and prevents us from being objective enough for our common good. Growing up, I used to listen to my mother’s stories about Wollofs and their beliefs. Most of what she used to emphasize upon as our unique heritage were the same things I later learnt to be the values among other tribes. While every tribe tend to promote the importance of its origin above all others, left on their own, individual tribes live lives that are encased in the usual love and hate, joy and sorrow, friendship and enmity pattern found in every human habitat. Furthermore, at the tribe level there are segregations based on family background, the person’s trade or ancestral hobbies. For instance blacksmiths cannot fraternize with certain classes of the tribe members; cobblers, singers, drummers and “slaves” are also castigated on very primitive theories. But those are even far cries from when a family in the tribe is accused of being witches, if you know what I mean. Those demonized, as “Domas”, “Buwaa” or human eaters are believed to exist among all tribes but not among “Toubabs.”

However, it was not until the PPP in their quest for independence from the British started spreading the inaccurate political message that the Wollofs had stolen their country, Gambia, and kept them under suppression for centuries that I began to realize the filth behind tribalism. As far as some of them were concerned, colonialism with all its degradation had nothing to do with the “Toubabs” in charge for over three hundred years but everything to do with Wollof hegemony. And to the majority of Mandinkas whose votes were needed to put the political scam artists in power, the trick worked perfectly.

It was anyway clear that when they got the victory they needed they had to work and live by what the British put in place including the usage of the English/ colonial language as the official language. To progressively maintain such kind of administration, one had to be real and understand that it needed more than being only a Wollof, Mandinka, Jola or Fula to forge the ideal team of workers.

So Jawara had no choice after independence but to soften up the initial ethnic rhetoric and build a government that was more pluralistic than the one envisaged by most of the pioneers. Taking that approach sooner helped him stay in power longer than necessary. But the man perhaps thought he could continue joggling around with the same political tactics and stay in power for the rest of his life. Anyhow, pulling off thirty years on the throne was quite a marvelous achievement. But while in the eyes of many optimistic Gambians Jawara was viewed more as a unifier than a divider it was in my judgment the foundation of deceit on which the PPP was built and maintained that sabotaged his efforts to consolidate a durable democracy.

In my last paper I briefly mentioned the late Dr. Lamin Nafa Saho and how he played the tribal card as a PPP militant while Jawara looked the other way. I was going to narrate an embarrassing encounter I once had with Dr. Momodou Manneh who had once treated me the way he did only because I spoke to him in a language different from Mandinka. Elaborating on the details of that unfortunate encounter and personalizing it might portray what was a common attitude of most of his type then look like an exceptional situation. These two political scam artists whose credentials as doctorate degree holders were questionable were one time the most vocal propagandists in the PPP; and tribalism was the trumped-up message they shamelessly spread around.

While I was attending Yundum College in the 70’s I could recall one Gambian pseudo- educationist called Hadara Ceesay. I don’t even know what tribe he had belonged to but he had claimed to have graduated from an American university with a doctorate degree and was to head the new Curriculum Development Center of the Gambian Education Department. But just before his official appointment, the government took the trouble of conducting an investigation that proved that the man didn’t actually have a doctorate degree. That was long before Saho and Manneh appeared with their dubious doctorate degrees.

Were their claims investigated like Mr. Ceesay’s? I seriously doubt it.

Instead, they became well-entrenched PPP stalwarts because of among other things their guts to take on another feared political clown, Sheriff Mustapha Dibba who for decades was a big nuisance to the Jawara administration. Dibba a Mandinka who was among the founders of the PPP when the party was called the People’s Protectorate Party had later broken away when it became the People’s Progressive Party and formed his own tribal party, the NCP, on the premise that Jawara was not Mandinka enough and had betrayed his people to the Wollofs. There was no truth in it but the gullible fell for it as usual.

I am sometimes tempted to insinuate that the coming into power of Jammeh is more of a direct consequence of the failure of the policies of the past government than anything else. But I think this is all a special lesson for the Gambians to avoid the same mistakes in the future. 

To think that it was going to take a person like Jammeh to shatter the myth around such colossal politicians like Dibba and Manneh shows how phony they were as agitators.

This is what I think we should be debating now to prepare us for the next government of The Gambia after Jammeh.

I will take this last moment to extend my condolence to the family of Vincent Jatta whose untimely death came as a big shocked to me. Vincent was one of the few genuine officers in The Gambia National Army (GNA) who acquired his rank by having the proper qualification and passing the officer exams tailored along international standards. He was not among those post-coup d’etat officers who were decorated with ranks for no justifiable reason. He was highly professional and lived a good Christian life.

May his soul rest in peace. Amen!

To be continued.