If he were a son of Kombo, he would have been called Jung. And he did not live in the early 1900s and neither did he write a book called Dreams nor was the best known quote he left the world: 'In the superstitions of all times and races, the dream has been regarded as a truth telling oracle… the occurrence of prospective dreams cannot be denied' like Carl Gustav. The only thing I read which he wrote was some dissection of the Gambian economy on the pages of Daily Observer in early 1994.
As for a quote he's left the world? I don't know, perhaps: 'Why are you trying to kill me?' Only my guess…since no one has since come out to say he was there when he was dying.
Our Jung has now morphed into a chimera, existing only in our tortuous dreams and fading pained memories. But exactly 17 years ago next week, he was real. He had bones and flesh with hot blood running in his body, handsome, young, intelligent, black and proud - every mother's dream son.
But let me explain lest you do not understand why I call him Jung. In the lores of the Mandinka, every name has an appendage called Jindirangn'o; Bakary becomes Dembo, Kaddy becomes Siroh, Alaji becomes Bambo, Musa becomes Bala, Mbemba becomes Kemo and so forth. So, if I doff my peacock hat and want to impress you that I am cultured young Mandinka man, I'd say, Jung instead of the more hackneyed Ousman, and that was Koro's name.
His father was a teacher who was known as plain 'Master Ceesay', a man belonging to the orthodox school of Kekoto Maane who insisted on spelling his last name 'Sise' in the Frenchified way. His mother was a more interesting woman of sorts called Fatmatta Sanyang. She once served as a nominated WMP in Jawara's House of Representatives.
“Ousman loved and lived for Africa. He always told me that Africa is on the threshold of a golden era. He believed so much in the vitality of Africa's youth. I think that was why he accepted to join the ranks of AFPRC,' Fatmatta told me during one of those days of grief after losing her son.
Jung was born on 10 March 1962. His grandmother gave him the name 'Koro' a corruption of the Bambara term Nkoro (Nkoto) meaning my brother. Koro was a toddler when the Sises were transferred from Brikama to Pakalinking school. His mother remembered how she would put him in a cardboard box at the back of her class with a feeding bottle of glucose water tilted by his mouth. 'He was very active then, and when we had our end of term drama shows, he would hop on stage and sing 'Ayo toti…toti wo toti…' she recalled with tears in her eyes. He grew up into a strong lad, an admirable wrestler and loved hunting small game.
After years of criss-crossing the rugged terrain of provincial Gambia with his roving teacher-parents, in 1974 Jung took his Common Entrance Examinations at Serekunda Primary School and was admitted to Gambia High School. “One thing he was emphatic about was that this country needed good agriculturists more than anything,” Fatmatta recalled. After two years at the Soil and Water Management Unit, where he probably met Baba Jobe and was introduced to his brand of Libyan inspired revolutionary African socialism, he went on a Gambia Government award to the University of Legon, Ghana and despite a lost semester, graduated with a degree in agricultural economics entitling him to a scholarship for a masters degree programme at the University of New South Wales, Armidale, Australia.
Upon his successful return, Jung was made economic adviser to the NIB chief executive. Unimpressed with government service, after thirty-six weeks he left to set up a computer and consultancy firm called Quantum Associates with friends, Muhammed Jah and Gibril Chorr. After the events of November 11, he was appointed Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs and appointed honorary member of the all-powerful inner cabal military council. He quickly became star of the cabinet and Chairman Jammeh's favourite.
Months after Jawara, his Boeatian ministers and Dan Quayle-ish vice president fled and a few weeks after Jung was made minister, Chairman Jammeh made a ceremonial visit to the new Village Royal of Kanilai. I was there and I saw how the Chairman would turn to Jung, whisper something in his ear and both would beam as if in a mischievous conspiracy to lace baby-face Ebou Jallow's morning croissant with ricin!
During the one-hour-odd dance spectre that was laid out before the Chairman that afternoon by his people, not even the then First Lady Tuti Faal commanded a greater attention of the head of state than Jung. Later that day, as the visitors with the Chairman in the lead were playing the tourist around the new Village Royal, I bumped into Jung, sitting in a white Nissan pick-up listening to his favourite Indian music on the car stereo. It was not a disc of a classical composition by sitar playing Ravi Shankar; it was a plain non-chrome cassette of a soundtrack from Amitab Bachaan's Anda Kanoon epic film he probably bought from VP Records on Sayerr Jobe Avenue.
It was not until later that I understood why Jung would be listening to such music - a music I'd deem fit for my junior sister and her kind. But that was Jung, he was himself and what he wanted to listen to is what he would listen to. He was comfortable with himself. Yes, he was not so modest as to declare like one of the urban dervishes in the PDOIS collegiate that he will only 'wear one pair of khaki trousers, one shirt and one brown flip-flop for one year', but he was humble enough to refuse being chauffeured around town in the posh ministerial Mercs Jammeh seized from Jawara's ministers.
That day in the Village Royal was the first of many interactions I was to have with Jung. He gave me the impression he was a patriot - not the scoundrel type now mushrooming all over town – who thought he could contribute positively towards the promised 'African Renaissance'.
I could vividly remember on 18 June 1995 when I called Jung at his bachelor's pad in London Corner and was told he wasn't in. I tried his mother's house behind Aisha Marie Cinema and he was not in either. Finally, I got him at his office, Quadrangle, that late evening, to get a story on the preview of the 1995/96 fiscal year budget he was to deliver the following week. “I am sorry, I am doing the final vettings at this moment, call me later,” he told me, replacing the handset. I didn't know it would be the last time I would talk with him.
Three days later, on a Sunday morning, I left Brikama for our Bakau offices when I heard the news that Jung had died the previous night. Like many who heard the news that sun-shy wet morning, it came as a rude shock. “It was impossible,” I told myself, “how could this man, a taekwondo fighter of some merit, healthy and fit as a fiddle the last time I saw him, possibly have died so suddenly?” I went to his family house and there were the mad, frenzied crowds of wailing women… and men. I talked to Jung's father, brave man! I went to see his mother. What could she tell me? Her dripping tears just pooled in my notebook. Jung was her only son. How I pray that I never again see the agony of a mother for her only dead son!
Leaving the dolour of the Sise residence, I hitchhiked to Jambur, an offbeat village 33km somewhere southwest of Banjul. A few hundred meters south of the laidback village, a trunk road, paved with gravel, runs from Serekunda towards Gunjur. Taking the path that snakes out of the village, one arrives at a culvert on the road. And there it was; the Benz in which Jung supposedly died, standing against the metal railing of the culvert; incinerated, reduced to a macabre burnt grey chassis against a red sea of wet gravel and green woodlands populated by chirruping insects.
Did the car slam into the little bridge causing an explosion leading to the death of Jung? Perhaps, the front bumpers would have shown if they were not burnt, but I had not seen a dent on the metal frame of the Benz nor on the metal rods of the culvert, which would have been manifest in the event of an impact. The charred remains of Jung had been removed earlier and taken to Banjul's Royal Victoria. As I scurried around and inside the car, all I found were small human bones, broken glasses and pieces of metal. The police forensic scientists or whoever, had been there before me and had left, so I helped myself to a sample of my findings in a canvas bag as 'editorial evidence' (my editor, Kenneth Best, later returned the bones to Jung's parents).
While I was there playing the intrepid reporter, the women of the village, on their way to the paddy fields, would stop, gaze at the burnt car, put their hands over their gaping mouths and suddenly hurry on. I wondered, was there a superstition attached to burnt cars and dead unmarried sons among my cousins of Jambur? Carl Gustav Jung's Dreams could not tell, not even the Chinese Ching or 'Book of Changes' could.
A short while later, a police long vehicle came and towed the charred Benz away. I followed it to Serekunda police traffic garage, then returned to the Sise residence again. The sea of people, tears and glum faces! The grief and pain was so thick in the air, you could smell it. I couldn't help but make a mental comparison with the scene in Mariam Ba's Une Si Longue Lettre. How many of the tears were genuine? How many of the mourners really wished to be somewhere else? How many were there because the bug of curiosity bit them?
But analysis of such effete social mannerisms, would find no place in my Monday report for Best's Daily Observer, so I went to the Royal Victoria Hospital to learn something about the autopsy. After hours of waiting and running between the autopsy and x-ray rooms, all the quotable quote I heard was a loud pained 'Aaagh!' from a Dr Sana Ceesay, a cousin of Jung's who was a medical doctor at the MRC, when the x-ray film was developed. It was end of the road for me. I later asked him why he aaaghed. For reply, he gave me a blank look, as if he was neither conscious of my presence nor my question or that it was it was too painfully forbidden to speak about.
A few days later, Jung's remains were given back to his people and they covered it in seven pieces of white linen, lowered it two feet in the ground and hurriedly filled it up with black earth. The government promised to investigate and tell us the circumstances under which Jung died. Seventeen years later, nothing. So, the turbo wheels of Radio Kankang, that ever-verdant rumour mill, went into action.
I had written seventeen articles on Jung's mysterious death since, and interviewed two secretaries of state for the Interior, Sadibu Haidara-Fatty and his successor. Both told me they found nothing, arguing the onus was on the people who knew something about Jung's death to come forward.
Who would know anything if not for the unanswered questions: Was Jung's death a suicide? Why would he want to kill himself? Why was he driving alone on that deserted back road that rainy night after seeing off the head of state at the airport? Harrowing questions, but one day, indeed one day, the linen shall be washed clean. As Winston Churchill said some seventy years ago, this case is, at least by public knowledge, 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.'
Jung may have died from a motor accident. Or he may have been killed by some people for whatever reason as many were wont to believe. If the latter is the case, let these words ring in the ears of his killers as they take to their pillows tonight, remember a place:

There, earth's tears are dried
There, its
hidden things are clear
There, the work of life is tried
By a juster Judge than here.