Jammeh and the Colonial Legacy

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Once again Yahya Jammeh has been shown riding his favorite horse, with his favorite whip in hand, whacking angrily away at colonialism and claiming that colonialism did not bring anything to The Gambia. He fumes that Britain did not build more than one school and one hospital in the country over a period of 400 years of colonial rule. It is a known fact that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes a truth in your own mind. I say this because contrary to Jammeh’s frequent ranting about 400 years of colonialism, British colonial rule in The Gambia lasted a mere 76 years. While British and other Europeans had traded with Gambian merchants as early as the 1580s, The Gambia became a British crown colony only in 1889, and attained her independence in 1965 - exactly 76 years later. So it is absolutely not true that Gambia was colonized for 400 years as Mr. Jammeh would have us believe. Furthermore, anyone with the slightest sense of history knows that colonialism was not in Africa to develop the continent but to serve the selfish interests of the colonizers. It was an inherently extractive and exploitative regime. So this is no news at all. Expecting development from colonialism is foolish and Mr. Jammeh would be better advised to stop beating a dead horse and blaming colonialism for the mess that he and other so-called leaders of post-colonial Africa have created and continue to create for their hostage peoples. Africans wanted independence; they got it. It is their responsibility to develop their countries and stop blaming the past.

But before we proceed, it might be well to remind Mr. Jammeh that he does owe a lot to colonialism. For one thing, if he must reject all things colonial, he must start by refusing to speak or write the English language. He must then repudiate the territorial boundaries of The Gambia and draw new ones since these boundaries are totally a colonial creation. Then he must abandon the institutions and structures that make up the state he rules over – the Cabinet, the Legislature, the Judiciary – as all of these are products of the colonial regime. He must then do away with the flag and the coat of arms, both of which are typically colonial inventions. He must abstain from his beloved practice of mounting the so-called guard of honor, a very colonial spectacle that he loves so much that his cheeks literally tremble with excitement as he stiffly marches and surveys the troops at the airport and elsewhere. Then he must proceed further to abandon State House, which is the former residence of the colonial governor, and disband the police, also inventions of colonial rule. And then he must demolish the Mile Two, Jeshwang, and Janjangbureh prisons because the prison as an institution remains one of the most obnoxious legacies of colonial rule. Pre-colonial Africa did not have walled prisons guarded over by prison wardens and now so beloved of Mr. Jammeh because he uses them to eliminate his opponents. When next he talks about what colonialism has done or not done in Africa, he should not forget to thank them for what he calls his own five-star hotel – Mile Two Prisons. He must also thank them for bringing the uniformed army and the gun into Africa, the two pillars upon which his tyrannical regime squarely rests.

Perhaps more important than all of the above is Jammeh’s undying love affair with the biggest and worst legacies of colonialism – tyranny, oppression and financial exploitation. If we place his nonexistent 400 years of British colonial oppression on one scale and 20 years of Jammeh oppression on the other, Jammeh oppression will far outweigh colonial oppression by vast margins. Jammeh has killed and tortured and jailed and fired and disgraced and otherwise tormented more Gambians in 20 years than the British colonial regime had done in 400 nonexistent years of colonial rule. And since colonial rule made no pretense at upholding human rights and the rule of law, Jammeh’s total disregard for the rights and dignities of his own ostensibly decolonized and independent people is all the more shameful. Does Jammeh know that in post 1994 Gambia, some elders have demanded to know when all this independence would end?

If Jammeh prides himself in doing for Gambia what colonialism had failed to do, he must undertake to do the single most important thing colonialism failed to do: that is, politically empower the entirety of the Gambian population; eradicate mental poverty and political powerlessness by a rigorous regime of political education that will place power firmly in the hands of the people; cure the majority of Gambians’ erroneous perceptions of rulers as God-ordained; turn the Gambian people into one large sea of enlightened citizens who will vote for their leaders not based on tribal affinities or ignorant presuppositions, but on the grounds of informed choices and the potential for good, effective and ethical leadership; Find words to replace Mansa Kunda because there is no such thing as Mansa Kunda  in today’s Gambia. Colonialism certainly was not interested in empowering the people or teaching them what they need to know in order to make informed choices. And since Jammeh pretends to be better than the colonial rulers, that is the first thing he should do. The infrastructural developments he likes to brag and pound his chest about are utterly insignificant compared to the people they are supposed to serve. If he truly cares for the Gambian people, he should build them instead, rather than waste millions of dollars building white elephant projects.

But of course, bad leaders and tyrants like Jammeh prefer to build lifeless structures than to build living and intelligent beings. The lifeless roads and schools and other structures he likes to brag about will never question his authority or try to hold him accountable. But he perhaps knows that an intelligent and politically conscious population will not tolerate the kinds of utter nonsense he utters or the unethical activities he engages in. That is why he has banned newspapers and killed journalists; and that is why he cannot tolerate the idea of anyone talking about human rights, the rule of law and democracy in The Gambia. And finally, Jammeh is a personification of the oppressive legacy of colonial rule. His regime is a form of internal colonialism that thrives on the oppression, tyranny and the exploitation of Gambia’s resources – both human and material – for his own selfish gratification. So when he engages in whipping the horse of colonialism, he is actually engaged in earnest psychological self-flagellation.