The Fisherman's Tale - 2
 

 

Immediately after the presidential elections last October, there seemed to be widespread assumption that the struggle for popular power was over and that since the main opposition UDP conceded defeat, it was just appropriate to congratulate the winner, close ranks behind our respective national assembly members, put an end to the bilious inter-party quarrels and get on with the urgent task of nation-building. There was widespread fear that the disappointments of the opposition parties could generate fierce and ugly recriminations of massive vote rigging prompting leaders to declare the elections as unfair. But what happened seemed quite unpredictable.  Not only did the opposition not condemn the elections as flawed or unfair, supporters of the victorious party went on a rampage beating up political opponents as the government itself summarily terminated the employments of civil servants thought to be sympathetic to the opposition. This heralded the opening of a new and ugly chapter in Gambian politics. 

 

The electoral campaign had throttled into high gear since the APRC government repealed decree 89 - one of its most notorious - that banned the old political parties and some politicians of the first republic from active politics barely three months before the presidential elections. The move threw the whole political spectrum into confusion, as parties pondered alignments and strategies that would on the one hand deliver them from oblivion while on the other hand ensure that their combined strengths aggregate to an electoral overthrow of the heavy-handed, bad boy of Gambian politics. This proved to be a task more awesome than the parties themselves imagined.  The NCP, PPP, and GPP were not only faced with the problem of resurrecting themselves from a submarine existence, they had to do that with an organisational vigour and administrative clout that would create for them new, distinct, respectable, magnetic identities. All three parties quickly realized that the voter and supporter topography had been greatly altered and that managing new rivalries became more pressing than administering an all too obviously rickety coalition.  PPP and NCP, major rivals during the first republic were supposed to temporarily stop crossing swords to join hands with the UDP, a party whose mass base is largely composed of old diehard supporters of the former two.  It was also supposed that PDOIS, waging a lonely campaign on political morality and ethical economics for more than fifteen years against the entire political establishment would suddenly coalesce with a group consisting of lackluster politicians of dubious integrity and with momentarily suppressed mercenary whims. 

 

The whole idea of this coalition was based on a mathematical formula which supposed that the entire opposition's collective dislike of APRC rule was greater than loyalty to their own identity, political platform, individual ambition, deep-seated personal rivalries, and historical inter-party tensions between them; all of these variables, taken together, command more importance than most people believe.  It would have required a miracle, under the circumstances, for a coalition to be readily built on the framework of some tactical alliance in time for the elections.

 

A quick look at the structures of and the decision-making process in all mainstream political parties in the Gambia would show that they all are quite undemocratic. Yet without reservation, we expect that once voted into power these very undemocratic parties must produce governments that operate according to constitutional edicts, promote and defend civil liberties and operate representative, responsible and accountable governments. Because members and supporters of these parties do not engage in any form of rigorous debate free from persecution mania and pathological jealousies, where national issues are interrogated and prioritized on that bases, affiliation with a party is generally not the outcome of the contest of ideas. Some other forces must operate to determine political allegiance and influence willing compliance. Deciding forces in Gambian politics have to do directly with how power is exercised. These are some of the forces I would like to discuss here.

 

The Struggle for Rice

 

Approaching it from the east, from the direction of Bundung, the new SerreKunda market, with its imposing brick façade, stands out as a mammoth insignia to a nation desperately reinventing itself. Its gray, high walls bemoan a replica of the Mile Two prisons, fearsomely confining all its contents, including air and light. Yet its smooth curves and corners that look like mock minarets suggest a Dogon architecture imitating the mosque of Jenne freed of her wooden splinters that serve as supports during repairs to the building. The overall impression is that of strict confinement subdued by religious undertones.

 

But this abstract impressionism is quickly whisked away by the captivating decor of colours and materials that dress up the walls. You see rows upon rows of imported baseball caps, Karl Kani jeans, Tommy Hillfiger jumpsuits, huge sports trunks, Fubu t-shirts, Reebok sneakers and an assortment of Nike's air jordans, all  manufactured in the slave factories of South East Asia, the outsourcing el-dorado of the "superbrands". Hand-woven leather bags and sandals, mostly from Senegal, also compete for space with Dutch wax clothing, and a curious supply of plastic toys, Gambia's ubiquitous mades-in Hong-Kong. This decor hanging ten feet up the walls is an extension of space that the tables cannot provide on the outside. So you opt for the inside and you get zapped. Instantly. The yelling and the laughter, the pungent smell of "netetu" and dried fish is hopelessly dissolved by the fragrance of local incense and the heavy whiff of perfumed clothing; the shrills of bargaining duos, the infectious smiles, embrace and laughter from surprise encounters, and the constant blare of the latest mbalax tunes from scores of competing cassette players, the unbearable heat, and the abominable dust all militate against your sanity. You don't only have to stand the tiff at the butchers' but his licensed arrogance as well. He carelessly tosses a chunk of meat and bone onto the scales driving the weights up. The he quickly supplements the ritual by capping your dinner with bits of tripe and tells you, one kilo, twenty dalasi, take it or leave it. Like the fishmongers, being nice to customers is an unheard of luxury. Demand for meat and fish is permanently high just as supply is permanently low. This is the only place in the entire marketplace where you do not negotiate. 

 

Everything else is for bargaining: you negotiate your steps, pace and space, the price of peanut butter, a mound of bush spinach, bitter tomatoes, or even a meter of mosquito netting. You can bargain for a fairer price for bitter-cola, a cup of palm kernel oil, cuts of shea butter or a tiny piece of smoked cat-fish, or sea snail. The place is dangerously crowded, with thousands of women, Gambian women of all shapes and sizes, in their Friday bests laundered and perfumed to make you dizzy; throwing you momentarily off balance with gleaming smiles that expose gray-black gums. Their distractive beauty, and the sophistication of the market place makes men hopeless shoppers. Because the Gambian personality disapproves of anonymous humans, many assume that part of the market population that remains unfamiliar must include an unknown quantity of jinns; conveniently forgetting that they are themselves, per the same reasoning, members of that club of jinns in the eyes of those to whom they remain strangers. The market is not just a place of old-fashioned economic transactions. It is also an important venue for social interaction, with a sophistication that beats any stock exchange anywhere. You do not just have to get food for the family, you have to cook the best that your purse strings allow, procuring your ingredients under conditions of extreme and deafening chaos, while maintaining your sanity to be all smiles even when your husband comes home expecting a bowl of dinner for which he clearly did not provide adequate fish money!

Every single day, women troop to the market to negotiate the daily calorie intake of oversized families. Every, single, day. The permanent struggle for rice begins here; a struggle that, because it is biologically more compelling than any other, determines all kinds of allegiances.   

 

The Struggle For Rice

 

Gambian women have remained food crops cultivators for as long as we can remember. Working in the fields all year round, intermittently switch form the rice fields to the vegetable gardens during planting seasons, modern Africa has survived thanks to the back-breaking toil of our mothers and sisters. Since the commercialization of Gambian agriculture in the 1920s, men invariably proved their manhood by concentrating on groundnut cultivation directly and indirectly sustaining the colonial economy while funding a feudal system that fed a backward patriarchy. They remained pauperized ever since and no wonder, they could never understand why, on their own land, houses and huts they constructed should have to be paid for as yard or hut tax to the colonial administrators. The anarchic and violent character of Gambian Islam had, by the turn of the century, began to subside; and by the time Musa Molloh was banished to Sierra Leone in 1919, people on both banks of the river had settled into a relatively peaceful coexistence with the colonial administration. Groundnuts, sorghum, and millet being major cash crops were cultivated in cleared fields while cassava and maize, mostly grown for the local market remained important but secondary. Cultivation of  "findi" once important to the Gambian diet, seemed to have disappeared since the late sixties perhaps because its production is quite labour-intensive, and because it had to give space to cash crop farming. (That trend seems to be reversed now). Thanks to this sustained agricultural production, Gambians never suffered the kind of widespread famine that was prevalent during the past centuries throughout the Senegambia region. On the other hand seasonal hunger, caused by intermittent poor rainfall and drought occasionally plunged the entire country into harrowing food shortages that in turn forced entire communities to live on the rim of chronic malnutrition. The hungry season in Gambia is chronicled in a number of history books. In the rural areas people fed on grain stored in granaries until the next harvest. But depending on the size of the previous harvest, they may have to borrow food and even seeds for the next planting season when diets cannot be sufficiently supplemented with fruits, edible roots and leaves. Eventually, farmers end on getting indebted to petty traders and private groundnuts merchants, who made their wealth from this trade and interest rate hikes tied to loans to farmers. Momodou Musa Njai, Anton Tabal, and many others made their wealth in part by capitalizing on the hunger endured by Gambian peasants.

 

Farmers got a better deal on these loans when the cooperative union was formed after independence in 1965. Gambian diets were further subsidized through the school feeding program that brought crack wheat, powdered milk, canned beef and kangaroo meat, powdered eggs and vegetable oil to the schools. Not only students dined on wheat "benachin" but many teachers, especially head-.masters, stole a lot of this food to feed their families or otherwise sold it at the black market. But food was also donated by international agencies to relieve hunger in the country. And when it arrived it found politically designed ready-made channels for its distribution.

 

"Jawara  maano" was an apt label for rice, flower, and oil distributed in rural areas on behalf of the World Food Program by the PPP government. Members of the ruling party quickly claimed that internationally donated food was forthcoming thanks to the wise intervention and love of their dear leader Sir Dawda. While there had been incidents of denying opponents of the PPP this food, it perhaps was not as widespread as used to be claimed; yet by labeling the food Jawara "maano", known members of the opposition were more likely to suffer the consequences of uneven distribution, if not outright denial. And like many things Gambian, policy implementation does not have to be officially sanctioned especially if the prevailing practice serves the political interests of the ruling party. So since the 1970s, the decade of the first international oil crisis and the birth of the NCP, the struggle for political power became equivalent to the struggle for rice. You not only are guaranteed a job, a government contract, an import license, a scholarship for your son, a bank loan. You are also slated to receive a fair share of donated food. As far as I know, much of this formula remains true to this day.

 

Barely months after seizing power in 1994, Yaya Jammeh "maano" arrived on Gambian soil finding a ready-made distribution network in the form of the July 22 Movement. Throughout the country, Movement militants controlled the marketing of this rice, partly expanding and consolidating the APRC's mass base while strengthening the financial and administrative clout of the July 22 Movement itself. Yaya Jammeh rice, even though it was of poorer quality as it contained a lot of pickings, quickly gained on market share largely because it was sold at a price well below that of other brands. But the July 22 Movement, an instrument created to bring about a revolution for which there had not been any political or ideological preparation, and for which Gambian society was generally precocious could only survive through coercion. Through intimidation and using iron-fist methods, it laid the groundwork for the APRC victory in the 1996 elections, and was as a result the harbinger of what could be seen as the second revolution within the APRC. 

 

 Yai Kompin Power

 

The legitimacy that the '96 victory accorded the APRC was essential for the party to consolidate its social base. Unable to sustain continuous intimidation of political opponents without instigating both local and international condemnation, the party simply reverted to using the most refined and tested method of winning allegiance, beating even the PPP at a game it previously excelled at, namely patronage. But because patronage required the presence of a figure from which all power emanates and around which all planet-politicians revolve, Yahya Jammeh had to become a Sultan extraordinaire. Lacking in revolutionary, traditional and even constitutional legitimacy, he had to make his power coterminous with that of the state, exercising personal control over both the security apparatus and the administration. From him extends an intricate web of connections from State House to the remotest corners of the country with nerve centers comprising of party militants, businessmen, technocrats, "yai kompins" all of whom must expressly demonstrate personal loyalty to the President in an unending chain of patron-client relationships. (Yai Kompin is a wollof word that roughly translates to Mother of a local association, or simply chairwoman). In droves, former activists and power brokers of both the PPP and the NCP joined the APRC bringing with them social connections which went on to expand and consolidate the latter's fledging network of supporters. 

One well-known former NCP yai kompin, previously a staunch vote canvasser for Jibou Jagne simply joined the Jammeh gravy train virtually carrying along the entire NCP supporter base in Serre-Kunda East. Like all other yai kompins, she wields enormous social power, distributing kilograms of rice and sugar  to all party loyalists. Tons of this food were received directly from the President at the beginning of the last Ramadan. Employment opportunities, government contracts, presidential subsidies to pay for the Hajj to Mecca, and other benefits all are procured through this massive distribution pipeline - connections that web together party patrons and clients. In the run up to the elections they controlled local propaganda and designed strategies for winning votes, donning to supporters hundreds of APRC campaign t-shirts. They harried and startled up UDP supporters from the streets by blowing whistles after them and screaming "Yellow Fever" for their yellow colored garb; or they would scream verbal twits such as "Darboe dolominna" (Darboe the drunkard). UDPians would usually retort with "Jammeh daaba" (Jammeh the large-mouthed"). (These were the humorous sides of the electoral campaign that we missed). 

 

All of this fabric of grass-roots support derives from a system of dependency that provides material incentives for the effective procurement of political power and privilege. And as more money is poured into the country in the form of aid and loans, this network becomes bigger and stronger even as the president also becomes more powerful. One only has to pick from the free flowing veneration gushing from National Assembly members to understand that President Jammeh is quickly becoming a cult figure. That is not just a danger to Gambia's evolution towards an inclusive democracy where human and civic rights are respected, but even those institutions and individuals who could otherwise advice the President without fear on matters of public policy may gradually lose the moral wherewithal to do so. 

 

Naturally, if Gambians are turning in droves to the president to show allegiance, one should conclude that he must enjoy some kind of legitimacy? He has since July 1994 gradually earned legitimacy as a national leader because of development projects his governments carried out; and area whose true impact seems largely misjudged by most of us in the Diaspora. But before going into that, I would like to briefly discuss the nature of poverty in the Gambia and how it impacts on thinking and values.

 

Theory of Relativity

 

The landscape is generally hot, ancient, and unchanging. Peasants continue to toil the land hoping that returns from agricultural produce would surpass the previous season's. Once in a while heads of large families would harvest handsomely, so that the old man gets a second wife, buys a new bicycle or a transistor radio, cuts new school uniforms for the boys. But generally, it is never this rosy for most families. Unable to provide aluminium roofing for the house, they manage to barely survive during the coming rains. Unable to save a penny after a lifetime of toil much of their time is spent worrying over the next meal. The economic conditions are almost the same for the armies of unemployed living on the fringes of sprawling urban centers. Those who are gainfully employed are barely able to manage maintaining decent meals for their nuclear families as they subsidize relatives who are much worse off. Scraping a living in the suburbs of Serre-Kunda has become an art form. Some would go to the market everyday without a penny but would come home with sufficient condiments to prepare a meal; they steal from the baskets of others in the hustle and congestion; others would go there simply to eavesdrop on conversations about an actual christening ceremony just to scud to the venue for a free meal. My aunt tells me that some would openly beg or otherwise steal food at these ceremonies to take home to their hungry ones. The latest trick is to barge into a compound pretending that you were told about a ceremony. The unsuspecting inhabitants will simply rectify you and direct you to the correct address! People are so poor they will do anything to survive. They would steal clothes you hung to dry; they would steal bricks you made for your construction work; some would even dare carry away your meat stew from your kitchen! Those of us living overseas have had the most original experiences of such social scams. You send money home to be divided, and dad would cheat mum of her share; your cousin who is supposed to finance your mansion will send you photographic evidence of a finished house only to find that there was nothing at all when you pay him a surprise visit. 

A friend of mine shipped home a new car to be operated as a local taxi. Because of troubles with his own family he decided to let his mother-in-law manage the business and handed her a savings book where deposits are to be registered every fourteen days or so.  When he journeyed home with his wife for a long awaited holiday, he decided to take a look at the savings book while in his car on the way to Brikama. Disbelieving his eyes, he summoned the driver to stop at the side of the highway. Squinting, he robbed his eyes vigorously to take another look at the figures. His wife assured him that it was right, 250 dalasi only! He got behind the wheels himself and drove like mad to his in-law. Wildly waving the savings book he seized an axe chasing his half naked mother-in-law around the huge compound.  The entire neighbourhood  instantly filled up with amused spectators. 

 

All of us have heard or experienced such stories of deceit.  Gambians are becoming more desperate. Without remittances from family members living and working overseas many more would be facing despair; people are worried about their inadequate take home pay; worried about the future of their children. They are permanently disturbed by the plight of neighbours and relations who are worse off; about inflation eating into their pay cheques. Farmers are worried about the effects of failed crops as sporadic rains becomes even more sporadic, about unsold crops, their state of health, the plight of their tired wives, the spiraling cost of rice, candles, fish and medicine. Constant worry is their lifelong companion; their lives are giant experiences of long endless nightmares that are sparsely punctuated with heavy doses of traditional merry making! Their lives are so tasteless they compensate it with huge gulps of sugar and oil eventually falling prey to hypertension and diabetes. And if you have not understood Einstein's theory of relativity, here is a humble help! Constant worry means pain for the great majority of Gambians. Because they are always in psychological pain, they experience time to be much longer that it actually is. Ten years in the West becomes equivalent to twenty-five years in Gambia! So Gambians age quickly, growing much older by your next visit. If you live a sweet life, time flies for you. If you live a hard life, time crawls. (Just compare yourself with those childhood friends who have it hard in Gambia!).  In a permanent state of despair and helplessness, people's moral fiber gradually weakens, giving way to an encroaching tendency to commit crime, cheat, steal and lie, to make life just a little bit more bearable. Thorough honesty becomes almost a stoical feat for which a very few are capable. A ubiquitous complaint of overseas-based Gambians is the inability to find an honest Gambian at home! Many fail however, to make the connection that any kind of morality is buttressed by production relations prevalent in society. Gambian society, must also, in spite of its lauded biological closeness, be looked at along class lines. So this is the socio-economic milieu in which we have to imagine the ascent of a leader who does not only promise development projects, but delivers much of it and thereby changing the ancient landscape forever.

 

The Infrastructure Debate

 

At a personal level, I do not think any aspect of debate on APRC rule and politics has been as poorly conducted as that which pertained to the development projects  governments of the said party carried out. Well before the October elections and months after it Gambia-L pundits invariably addressed this issue with intellectually fraudulent and blowzy doublespeak. It was easy to see that much of the debate, precisely because it was polluted with politics, turned out to be nothing more than clunky anti-Jammeh propaganda. What seemed unestablished at the onset was that irrespective of economic policies, development can hardly take place in the absence of a functioning infrastructure. There must be a reasonably nation-wide and quality road network, telecommunications facilities, adequate utility supply (water and electricity), adequate primary health care, and above all an educational system geared towards producing a skilled workforce. In spite of all its shortcomings, the Jammeh regime invested heavily and seriously in all these, producing under the circumstances, highly satisfactory results! Yet serious, well-meaning, well-schooled Gambians cannot bring themselves to say so! Of course, you can always find fault with the Jammeh regime, and it is perhaps true that it never got its priorities right. Moreover, schools without books or qualified teachers can hardly be called schools; and clinics and hospitals without medicine and doctors may simply be well-lit charnel houses. But in a society where governments hardly built anything at all, new schools and clinics are seen by the poor not only as welcome dents in the empty landscape, but they figure that empty buildings are better than no buildings at all; that a university that produces half-baked graduates is better than no university at all; that paved roads are a very welcome departure from hundreds of kilometers of graveled pot-holes that powder your clothes and greasy hair with "coco puns"; dusty roads which together with leaded petrol fumes from dump away vehicles account for much of the respiratory illnesses Gambians suffer from. Perhaps many reasoned that commending the APRC government for a job well done was equivalent to depriving the UDP or the coalition of propaganda scores. So it took our friend Mr. Asbjorn Nordam to remind us that the successful development projects do not belong to Jammeh or the APRC but to Gambia! And now dear reader, my point is: if overseas based, educated, well fed, economically secure, active cyber dwelling Gambians cannot see the difference between what belongs to Jammeh and what belongs to Gambia, how will hungry, poor, spiritually drained, pained, exhausted, and illiterate Gambians such as I described earlier, see the same difference? How?

 

Not so long ago Buharry Gassama provoked a discussion on Gambia-L by asking why the Western media seems always hell bent on providing visual images of Africa in the forms of grass huts and dusty cave-like dwellings, or something to that effect. Western journalists deliberately portray Africa as dusty and primitive but their actions do not produce the intended effect.  Those images are so disturbing and embarrassing to Africans that almost all of us automatically desire to change them! And throughout our lives our own background of relative material poverty compels us to alter the images as soon as we get the means of doing so. As a result, from Sweden and from all over the West the first thing Gambians do is to commission the construction of dwellings for our families and ourselves as a way to escape from that primitive imagery that we have come to detest so much. By our actions we seem to make the strongest possible statement, carved in stone and bricks (!) that our own development is coextensive with putting up huge mansions (by average Gambian standards) caring little whether or not the immediate neighbourhood is a colony of beggars. That way we unknowingly reinforce the mentality that development, indeed, consists of putting up brick and marble structures! 

 

Conclusion

 

Then down the road comes Y.J.J! He preached revolution and altered the landscape. He rebuilds the airport to everyone's delight; he builds excellent second class roads, builds a university, hospitals, clinics, wires up the country to the web, brings on television, and so on and so forth. The poor, relying only on their memory immediately recognize that more government sponsored structures have been placed on the Gambian landscape during the last six years of the 20th century than the previous ninety-four. Right here, the most important theoretical explanation that immediately comes to mind is Marxian dialectics.  Changes in the environment, even if not directly caused by changes in the mode of production, can affect consciousness in ways so important as to be able to reciprocally affect the very environment that changed it in the first place. Yahya Jammeh has not just shown that it is possible to "develop" the country. He has also created a relativistic precedent that compels the performance of subsequent leaders to be compared to what he did. And not only that. 

The development of the infrastructure of an underdeveloped country helps forge a national consciousness. Citizens become hopeful of the future and readily compare their progress with that which obtains in neigbouring countries. This induces a heightened sense of nationalism and many upbeat citizens will readily assure you that Gambia will soon become king of the pygmies. Those who are skeptical are readily billed as unpatriotic, drooling doubters stubbornly unwilling to see the lights from Singapore. Progress made could easily get to the leaders head, and if external conditions are unfortunate enough, he might just crush the castles by provoking a senseless war. Remember Issayas Afeworki of Eritrea?

 

So what should we expect? Studying the deliberations and motions of the house of parliament since the 1970s one quickly learns that the most consistent issues raised by the opposition NCP deal with matters relating to our country's primitive infrastructure. Questions about bridges and roads to rice paddies, schools and clinics, ambulance services in the provinces, numbers of teachers and doctors, and agriculture related issues. These were the issues that were invariably raised.  Now that the APRC government is seen to be tackling these questions well, is there any politics left for the NCP to pursue? And when Sheriff Dibba jumped fence, why should all the urban poor, and flunkies of the old networks stay around as the gravy train starts to move? The annals of Gambian political history is replete with soggy cases of cross-carpeting. Swarms of independent candidates, members of the official opposition, without a twinge of compunction, simply rescind representation of their constituencies and join the party in power. Commitment to an ideology or a cogent system of political beliefs never comes to mind. The ruling idea is simply that which extols sectional and personal advantage. Many reason that PPP has had its chance and shared the spoils of power. Now it is their turn to wine and dine. And true to its character, a sultanist order readily punishes those who fail to step in line with the dear leader. This is one major reason why the UDP will become gradually disarmed and weakened. 

 

The struggle for rice, i.e. the poverty induced clamouring for economic and social advantage through the acquisition of political power combined with the sense of hope that development projects generate are the principal reasons behind the APRC victory of the October 2001 elections. It is thus safe to assume that social values in Gambia are not reflected in her Constitutional edicts. We should not believe that because her draft constitution was fairly well debated and discussed during the period of transition in 1996, it must therefore rule Gambian political conduct.

 

Epilogue

 

The APRC, like the Rawlings coup in Ghana in 1981, has failed in its declared mission of bringing about a social and political transformation of the Gambian polity. After its victory at the 1996 elections it made a u-turn pursuing conservative and backward neo-colonial policies, subjecting the domestic economy to the interests of private capital and betraying the popular aspirations of the toiling masses of Gambian workers and peasants. 

We have witnessed on Gambia-L and even the local media, the stifling of progressive debate in favour of radical liberal chic thrusting a party like the UDP as the true democratic alternative to an increasingly autocratic APRC. It promoted a revisionist politics that barely concealed its hope to resaddle into power the old and discredited political order that hopelessly proved, for three decades, its incapacity to seriously transform Gambia's social formation.

 

Progressive Gambians of all democratic persuasions must cease the time to redirect responsible discourse towards encouraging the Jammeh government to carry out its good work of developing Gambia's infrastructure while criticizing it for failing to put up popular democratic structures that would eventually enhance the struggles of ordinary Gambians toward social liberation. We must as well vigorously resist efforts by the regime to undermine the authority and independence of democratic institutions such as the judiciary and the press.  Likewise, we should insist that the democratic and Human Rights of Gambians be observed and respected and those responsible for the massacre of students in April 2000 must be brought to justice; and that a reinvestigation be launched into the death of Koro Ceesay; and that Dumo and his co-detainees should be released from incarceration. Then just perhaps, as one thousand women ride along Kanilai Boulevard to the president's farm, it may occur to one of them that they could be earning a steady income, working on state farms geared towards growing and processing fruits and vegetables for export. 

 

[Imperialist cultural dominance of which the educated elite are the first victims prevent us from thinking independently: Years ago, in a critically acclaimed documentary called the Roots of Music that ran on Swedish television, it was categorically asserted that the roots of all modern Western music lies in the Gambian region of the old Mali empire! Yet if you telephone some major banks in the Gambia today, as you wait to get hooked up, the music you hear is not any soothing original classical Gambia kora. You hear old man Mozart in the background! Likewise the premier IT-company in Gambia calls itself Quantum (!), a name that is absolutely meaningless to 99 percent of all Gambians. Happy are the victims of cultural amnesia.]

 

Wishing you all a great week end and thanking you for your time.

 

Momodou S Sidibeh,

 

Stockholm / Kaatong.

 

 

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