Traversing Gambia, Africa’s smiling coast

It became apparent that visiting The Gambia, a country fondly called “The Smiling Coast of West Africa,” was imminent for me when I was invited in 2017 as a speaker to an event by a group of University of Ilorin History and International Relations students. Called African Youth Action Network, it is led by a […]

It became apparent that visiting The Gambia, a country fondly called “The Smiling Coast of West Africa,” was imminent for me when I was invited in 2017 as a speaker to an event by a group of University of Ilorin History and International Relations students. Called African Youth Action Network, it is led by a young vivacious Gambian lady, Tida Ndure.

At the event, tagged, “Create Your Own Story,” I met another speaker invited from The Gambia, Momodou Sabaly, who had worked as a top level official for the Gambian government under the regime of President Yahaya Jammeh and was clamped in jail at the tail end of that dictatorial government and  was only rescued by his own account as the forces from Senegal and Nigeria entered Banjul, the capital island city of the Gambia and hovered above it to force Jammeh out of power in 2016,when he tried to renege on leaving power in an election he clearly lost to the opposition candidate, Adama Barrow.

At the event, he delivered an inspirational speech to the students like I did too. And when he learnt that I am a writer and president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, he sought for a private audience with me the following day at the Unilorin researchers’ guest lodge, where we met to exchange notes on how we could forge cooperation between Nigerian and Gambian writers. He writes too. We exchanged books and parted with the strong promise that we would meet again. I did not hear from him again after that.

In the first quarter of 2018, I was in Accra, Ghana, to attend the First Pan African Writers’ Conference organised by the African Union, where I met another Gambian, Hassoum Ceesay, the vice president of the Writers Association of the Gambia (WAG), who is an historian, copyright expert and curator of the Gambia national museum. He introduced himself to me and told me he had been following all the activities of the ANA)on-line. He appeared to me as an easy-going fellow and we struck an instant friendship and later went shopping together for hours at the popular Mokola market in Accra on the eve of our departure from Ghana. The first question I asked him was if he knew Momodou Sabaly and he replied that the Gambia is a place where everyone knows the other person as it is a small country. He later told me how Sabaly, my first Gambian friend, had been a sort of ideologue for Jammeh until he found himself in the belly of the tiger. We exchanged books and I parted again with another Gambian with the faint whiff that I would soon be in The Gambia.

In the last quarter of 2018, my Gambian friend, Hassoum Ceesay, reached me that he would want me to get the latest Journal, Tarikh, of the Historical Society of Nigeria,  that was as at then hosting a conference in Kaduna. It happened he had an essay in the journal. I procured the journal through a friend attending the conference, Dr Saka Aliyu, from the Bayero University, Kano. Journal in hand, I read through his essay on the evolution of the Gambian national diplomacy entitled, “Small but Mighty.” I asked him for an address to send the journal to him and his reply was, “Why not bring it to The Gambia for me on a kind of working holiday. We will bear some of the cost.” The offer was tempting and I took it.

I arrived Banjul International Airport about half an hour past midnight on January 29, 2019 to the waiting arms of Bakary, the official driver of my host, Hassoum Ceesay, who has now become the acting Director General of the National Centre for Arts and Council (NCAC) of The Gambia. I was ushered into an SUV with the plate number NCAC 1 and I smiled because the acronym of my host’s office is the same as mine in Nigeria, which is National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC). We had a long drive from the airport to where I would be quartered for the whole of my stay, which was Seaview Garden Hotel in the heart of Serekunda, a tourists’ enclave near Banjul. The long drive from the airport to the hotel was the first thing that disproved the idea of The Gambia being a very tiny country in my head.  I settled in after some initial hiccup from the reception, which I could not believe could happen in a country renowned for tourism like The Gambia.

I only caught a few hours of sleep on this first day of my stay in The Gambia as I had a weeklong itinerary for my visit drawn ahead by my host.  At the reception in the morning after having my breakfast in a hotel where it appeared I was the only black person among the guests, the others being tourists from different parts of Europe and the Americas, I was picked up by a young upcoming Gambian writer, Bintou Sanneh, who would be my companion-guide throughout the duration of my visit; and with the driver, we drove to meet my host in his office in Banjul.

Banjul, the capital city of The Gambia, is an island, formerly called Bathurst, named after one of the colonial overlords. The Gambia itself is a country of six regions, surrounded by Senegal, making it look like a strip of a country within the bigger Senegal and bordered on one side by the Atlantic Ocean, and with a population of under 2 million persons. It has about five major ethnic groups like the Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Sere and Jola. It is a small country but with an interesting history and resonating reputation in the larger African polity.

These facts were reeling in my head as we drove to Banjul to meet my host. The drive itself was picturesque as we passed wetlands on both sides of the highway and other interesting landscapes that have made the country a beacon of tourism. Getting to the premises of the National Museum of Gambia, where my host, Hassoum Ceesay, has his office, I found it bothered by very high walls on one side and I asked if that was a prison precinct. I was told it is the wall of the State House. My mind went to Yahaya Jammeh and I thought that surely, such high walls are requirements for the protection of dictatorship. I found my host, the chief executive of a similar organisation where I work in Nigeria, to be an easy-going and practical person at work. His members of staff address him by his name and come in and go at will. The stultifying and pretentious aura of the offices of chief executives as we know it in Nigeria, with the “ogaism” in full display, was absent. What I saw were people simply doing what they had to do. Before long, my first Gambian friend, Momodou Sabaly, whose book on the Gambian National Anthem I had been reading on the flight, came in. I was surprised to see him, but he explained that my host had informed him I was on my way to The Gambia and he decided to be the first to welcome me.

Soon, my host instructed I should start executing my itinerary, and the first port of call was the Kachikally Crocodile Pool in Bakau, one of the earliest settlements in the Banjul area. The drive to the place and the scenes reminded me of the inner precincts of Kano or Bauchi. The site itself hosts a community museum rich in various artefacts recounting the history of The Gambia and its people.

Drammeh, the museum assistant, deftly took me through the different sections and was curious to know what was going to play out in the impending general elections in Nigeria. Gambians have a kind of fondness for Nigerians from the big country. Particularly Drammeh and other Gambians, on meeting me, recalled the role played by President Muhammadu Buhari, the lanky General as they put it, in helping them to flush out Yahaya Jammeh.

With the museum round done, we emerged to confront a 500-year-old silk cotton tree leading into a pool full of crocodiles that are considered sacred. There were live crocodiles of all sizes, over a hundred, lying in the pool and in surrounding undergrowth. My fright antennae was on alert, having watched a lot of wild animal antics on National Geographic channel. Crocodiles in their habitats are very deadly. Drammeh joked that the crocodiles in the Kachikally pool ate only fish and the flesh of Nigerians! As he said that, I heard a slithering sound made by a moving crocodile behind me and I turned sharply, making everyone laugh out loud. He touched and caressed a big croc lying a few meters from us to show me that they were harmless and dared me to do same. I hesitated briefly and I did same for I know animals in sanctuaries are often different in manners from those in the wild. I remembered that we have at least two of such crocodile sanctuaries in Nigeria, one in Zuru, Kebbi State, called the Girmache Shrine in a town I have often visited, but not the shrine, and the other in Wukari in Taraba State. Drammeh asked me to put my hand into the open mouth of another crocodile facing us and I told him that will be taking things too far and he laughed. As we left the well-kept Kachikally Crocodile Pool I reflected on similar sites in Nigeria that we have left abandoned and not in good shape for anyone to even visit. We returned to the premises of the National Museum of the Gambia in Banjul where I was taken round the museum that was very rich in its collection about The Gambia from the pre-colonial to modern times.

Day two of my stay in The Gambia was the main menu of my visit, which was to parley with writers and forge a bilateral relationship between the ANA and WAG.

The parley held at the conference centre in the premises of the National Museum of the Gambia with both old and young Gambian writers well represented. I was introduced as the big writer from the land of literary greats like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka etc, who had come to tell them about my writing odyssey and how we run literary organisations such as ANA in Nigeria. Like all writers gathering anywhere, the event kicked off with readings from writers. I ended the session by reading a piece from my collection, The Talking Drum, entitled “This Land Moves Me to Sing.” Afterwards Hassoum Ceesay, who is the vice president of the WAG, spoke on the fitful existence of the writers’ association and how the public perception had been that Gambians are not writing enough and not engaging the government as they should. He also pointed out how writers lived under the climate of fear during the 22-year reign of former President Yahaya Jammeh and narrated a story of a writer who published something critical in the newspaper one day and had to flee the next. He, however, stated that to show that the writers’ association was still functional. It had, in 2018, published Bold Voices: A Selection of Gambian Poems, Prose and Plays and collaborated with their counterparts in Senegal to publish a bilingual anthology in French and English, entitled, Anthology of Senegalese and Gambian Poetry.

Another old hand in the business of writing in The Gambia, Dr Cherno Omar Barry, went down memory lane to narrate how Dr Lenrie Peters, still the most recognised writer from The Gambia outside the country with his much anthologised poem in African literary history, “We Have Come Home,” formed a writers’ club in 1971, which was publishing literary magazines and anthologies to promote literary creativity in the country. He stated that his death in 2009 led to the formation of the WAG that year. He also narrated how the Gambian press, over the years, supported the flourishing of literary creativity and gave insight on how the fervour of years past could be revived with the new air of freedom in the land.

I took the floor afterwards, telling them how I started writing and the motivations behind some of my writings. I told them that writing under the spectre of dictatorship is nothing new and that what writers do everywhere is not to succumb to that. I told them about the Nigerian experience under General Sani Abacha, where a renowned writer like Ken Saro Wiwa was murdered and how even the mighty Wole Soyinka had to flee the country via a footpath in ‘rapid dialogues with his legs’ when the dictator was gunning for his head. I spoke about the language question in African literature that is yet to be solved and how some of the best of our writers are out of Africa and the irony of a writer like Achebe living and dying outside Africa, with an iconic writer like Ngugi Wa Thiongo still living outside the continent. I also dwelled on the need for people around Africa to start reading ourselves again as it is like the literary conversation that was going on around Africa stopped with the demise of the old African Writers Series. I later explained to them about the formation, structure and functionality of the ANA.

The question and answer session that followed was a revelation of the passion of the young Gambian writers to excel amidst their delimiting environment. The plight of the young writers is the same everywhere: lack of accessibility to opportunities, lack of publishing outlets, lack of appreciation for writings in the indigenous languages and not being taken seriously by the society.

A particular female older writer called Fatouma, who had stayed in Nigeria for close to 30 years before relocating home, spoke glowingly of how the Nigerian literarily throbbing media environment helped her creativity. I responded to the anxious young writers’ questions by telling them how the young writers in Nigeria overcame some of the identified difficulties by embracing the limitless opportunities in the digital sphere. I ended by telling them they must continue to write with a clear cause and purpose.

I spent the eve of my departure from the Gambia at an African club in Serekunda called the “New Afric” with vibrantly coloured murals of black heroes and inspiring quotes and scenes and of course with  a live local dance ensemble entertaining the crowd, mostly whites.

We drove leisurely to the airport. We got to the airport’s main entrance and I discovered there was no toll, but a soldier came close to salute and said the usual things in that universal language of African military personnel out in the cold to ensure that people sleep in safety. I understood and dished out some spare Dalasis left in my pocket (the Gambian Dalasi is about 49 to $1). He gave me a smile typical of the people of Africa and flagged us on. I left The Gambia about 4am with a resolve to visit the country again in the near future.

 

Denja Abdullahi is the president of the Association of Nigerian Authors.