On Africa's Fluid Borders, My Land Is Your LandMr Touray,
I guess this is what you were trying to send to the list.
cheers
A.Drammeh.
April 16, 2000
On Africa's Fluid Borders, My Land Is Your Land
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By NORIMITSU ONISHI
ARAFENNI, Gambia -- When Abdoulaye Sowe built his mud house along a dirt road that links this country with Senegal a year ago, he chose a spot a few hundred feet north of the Senegalese border guard's straw shack.
North of the shack lay Senegal; south of it, Gambia. So Mr. Sowe, a Senegalese farmer new to the area, slept soundly in the belief that his house was well inside Senegal.
Then some old-timers told him that the guard's shack was built only a couple of years ago, and that before that the border guard had sat for years on the roots of a large tree. Indeed, the tree -- standing several hundred feet north of the shack and Mr. Sowe's house -- was long regarded as the borderline.
So overnight the farmer found himself, in mind if not in reality, inside Gambia, a newcomer to the familiar no man's land of an African border town.
"It seems that I am both in Senegal and the Gambia," said Mr. Sowe as he lay on the ground of his courtyard on a recent Friday afternoon. "But I am not sure. I have not made inquiries."
What Mr. Sowe the newcomer might not know is that more than in any other corner of the world, borders in Africa are fluid and porous. On the world's maps, its borders remain the absurd legacy of European colonialists who carved up the continent more than a century ago without consulting any Africans.
But African life on the ground often ignores the existence of borders, responding to the far stronger forces of family, ethnicity, commerce and language.
All those things are shared by the Gambians and Senegalese. That is not surprising, because Gambia is an enclave -- described variously, and usually unflatteringly, as having the shape of a worm or tongue -- inside Senegal. The British clung to this piece of land in French West Africa in the never-realized hopes of exploiting the Gambia River, considered one of the best navigable rivers in Africa.
And so colonial map drawing reached an absurd extreme here: Gambia is about 300 miles long, though only about 15 miles wide, a good jog north to south if not for the lack of bridges on the river, which flows east to west.
The maps, though, were never that precise, as Mr. Sowe's sudden move to Gambia showed. Did the border shift? Did the guard tire of sitting on a tree root? Those questions and others would have been put to the guard. But on the recent Friday the guard was not there. Maybe he was off to afternoon prayers. Maybe there was other pressing business.
No matter. People came and went, Senegalese and Gambians alike, mostly on donkey carts. Unlike the bigger crossing a few miles west, this one had no sign at the border.
"Gambians and Senegalese are from the same families," said Ali Sallah, 40, a tailor who named his shop "Senegambia" because he, like many people, leads businesses and lives in both countries.
"Whoever is from the Gambia has relatives in Senegal," he said. "And whoever is from Senegal has relatives here. Nobody can divide us. So it's better to unite."
The obverse of the borderless life that Mr. Sallah and his family live has been political leaders' insistence on the inviolability of Africa's colonial borders.
Even though the artificiality of the borders has contributed to wars and stunted economic growth -- in this instance, by leaving the Gambia River unused -- politicians have held on to territories whose geography nearly condemns them to poverty.
Africa remains sliced up into strangely shaped nations: some jagged, little ones like Gambia with a million people; others mammoth places whose sparse populations are hemmed in by long straight lines.
Most Gambians offer a quick explanation as to why their politicians resist the pull to unite with Senegal: they do not want to share power. Most leaders, as Caesar admitted, would rather be No. 1 in a small village in Gaul than No. 2 in Rome.
"If you are president, even of a small country like the Gambia, you always have a group of people to dance for you and a red carpet that will be unfolded in front of you," said Halifa Sallah, a well-known sociologist who is also involved in politics in the capital, Banjul.
In the 1980's Gambia and Senegal briefly formed a confederation, called Senegambia. But political squabbling doomed the union. Recently, after an independent member of the Gambian Parliament, Hamat Bah, resurrected the idea, a newspaper cartoon depicted him picking up a carcass with the old confederation's name on it.
"Politicians are being short-sighted," Mr. Bah said in an interview in his office in Banjul. "Confederation is critical to the long-term economic and political development of the Gambia and Senegal. It would open up the River Gambia to get goods not only through our two countries, but from all of West Africa."
Instead, Mr. Bah added, the river has "narrowed down in many spots."
"It's not as easily navigable as it used to be," he said, "because not many big boats are passing through, and no one is dredging it."
In Banjul, on the streets near the Gambia National Transport Control Association, trucks destined for the Gambian interior -- as well as Senegal, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Mauritania -- were being loaded with goods. Twenty-eight such trucks leave Banjul every day for various parts of Gambia, said Alieu Ngum, the association's field coordinator. Scores leave every week for the neighboring nations.
"No one uses the river now," Mr. Ngum said.
Borders may harm Gambia's long-term growth. In the short term, though, they benefit many people. Gambia's import duties are considerably lower than those in the rest of the region. So the trucks being loaded contain many goods that Gambia, serving as a transit point, simply brings in and then "re-exports."
Often the re-exporting is simple smuggling, sometimes done by paying off a customs guard to avoid further duties. Whatever the method, it is easier to do on land than on the river. Re-exporting may add little to building up Gambia's economy, but it brings in a third of the country's gross domestic product.
Here in Farafenni, about 75 miles east of Banjul, after the Trans-Gambian Highway was built four decades ago, linking the northern and southern halves of Senegal, thousands gravitated here, said Sambujang Jagne, 64, this town's traditional chief. Nationality mattered little. English was the official language on this side of the border, French on the other side. But African languages bridged the gap.
Here, as elsewhere in Africa, colonial officers divided ethnic groups and families when they drew boundaries.
To the British, what counted was the Gambia River, which promised access to the African interior. The only problem was that the surrounding region was under the control of the French.
Unable to exploit the river fully, the British tried to sell the territory to the French, or swap it for another. But the French, having built railways to circumvent their lack of access to the river, were not interested.
Britain believed that an independent Gambia would not survive and fully expected its former colony to form some sort of union with Senegal. The Senegambia confederation was born after Gambia's longtime prime minister, Dawda Jawara, was toppled in a coup while attending the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1980. After the Senegalese military placed him back in power, he agreed to the confederation.
But Senegambia -- which was supposed to integrate things like security and foreign policy -- led nowhere and eventually died when Senegal pulled its troops out of Banjul one morning without warning.
"Senegal wanted full political and economic integration," said Halifa Sallah, the sociologist. "But Gambia did not want that, because it would have wiped out the economic advantage it has with low import tariffs."
Since the formal dissolution of Senegambia in 1989, the two countries have drifted further apart.
Senegal, nearly 20 times the size of Gambia, has become a democratic society, although with a violent separatist movement in Casamance, a region isolated from the rest of Senegal, and left underdeveloped and angry.
Gambia, by contrast, has slipped into petty despotism since a 29-year-old army lieutenant, Yahya Jammeh, seized power in 1994. Shunned by Western donors, Gambia turned to Libya and was the only country to support Nigeria under the military dictator Sani Abacha.
In the last year, with rumors of a possible coup circulating, President Jammeh has seldom been seen in Banjul, spending most of his time in Kanilai, his home village.
The dream of Senegambia seems to fade with each day, surviving only in places like the tailor shop here.
"When I moved from Senegal to Farafenni, I knew I had relatives here," said one of the tailors, Ibrahim Janneh, 25. "But when I arrived in Farafenni, I found there were more than I had expected. I'm Senegambian."
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