Sailing on River Gambia for
literature
Denja Abdullahi
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, 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 the sway of
that dictatorial government.
In
the first quarter of 2018, I was in Accra, Ghana, to attend the 1st 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), a historian, copyright expert and curator of the Gambia National Museum.
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 then hosting an ongoing conference in Kaduna, which I got for
him. When I asked him to give me an address to send the journal, he replied,
“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 via an Airpeace flight from Lagos at about
half an hour past midnight on the 29th of January, 2019, to the waiting arms of
Bakary, the official driver of my host, Hassoum Ceesay, who had now become the
Acting Director General of National Centre for Arts and Council (NCAC) of the
Gambia. I was ushered into an SUV with the plate number NCAC 1, and I smirked
within me, because the acronym of my host’s office was the same as mine. We had
a long drive from the airport to where I would be quartered for the whole of my
stay, 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 that was 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 an 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
up-and-coming 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, in
honour of one of the colonial overlords with the same name. The Gambia itself
is a country of 6 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 5 major
ethnic groups –the Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Sere and Jola.
The
drive itself was picturesque as we passed wetlands on both sides of the highway
and other interesting landscapes that made the country a beacon of tourism.
Getting to the premises of the National Museum of Gambia, where my host,
Hassoum Ceesay, had his office, I found it bothered by very high walls on one
side, and I asked if that was a prison precinct, and I was told it is the wall
of the State House. My mind went to Yahaya Jammeh, and I thought, surely, such
high walls were 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 staffs addressed
him by his name, and would walk in and out of his office 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. 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 hosted a community
museum rich in various artefacts recounting the history of the Gambia and its
people. Drammeh, the museum assistance, 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.
With
the museum round done, we emerged to confront a 500-year old silk cotton tree
leading into a pool full of crocodiles 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 the alert, having watched a lot of wild
animal antics on the Natgeo World (crocodiles in their habitats are very
deadly). Drammeh was humorous by telling me 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 to laugh aloud. He touched and caressed a big croc
lying a few metres from us to show me that they were harmless, and dared me to
do same. I hesitated briefly, and I did same, for I knew animals in sanctuaries
were often different in manners from those in the wild. I remembered that we
had at least two of such crocodile’s sanctuaries in Nigeria, one in Zuru in
Kebbi State, called the Girmache Shrine, in a town I had often visited, but not
the shrine itself; and the other in Wukari in Taraba State.
Drammeh
asked me to put my hand into the widely opened mouth of another crocodile
facing us, and I told him that would 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 had 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
2 of my stay in the Gambia was the main menu of my visit, which was to parley
with writers from the Gambia and forge a bilateral relationship between the
Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) and Writers Association of the Gambia
(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
in the gathering. I was introduced as the big writer from the land of literary
greats like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, among others, 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 the writers, and I ended the session by reading a piece from my
collection, The Talking Drum entitled “This Land Moves Me to Sing.”
Afterwards,
Hassoum Ceesay, the Vice President of the Writers Association of the Gambia
(WAG), spoke on the fitful existence of the writers’ association and how the
public perception had been that Gambians were 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 years 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 day. 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, who, today, was 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 Writers Association of the Gambia that year. He
also narrated how the Gambian press, over the years, had 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 the things I had written. I told them writing under
the spectre of dictatorship was nothing new, and that what writers did
everywhere was not to succumb to that. I told them about the Nigerian
experience under General Sani Abacha, where a renowned writer, 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 was yet to be
solved, and how some of the best of our writers were out of Africa, and the
irony of a writer, like Achebe, living and dying outside Africa, with an iconic
writer, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, still living outside Africa. I also dwelled on
the need for people around Africa to start reading ourselves again, as it was
like the literary conversation that was going on around Africa stopped with the
demise of the old African Writers Series. I, later on, explained to them about
the formation, structure and functionality of the Association of Nigerian
Authors (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, I explained, was the same everywhere: lack of
accessibility to opportunities, publishing outlets, and appreciation for
writings in the indigenous languages. A particular older, female writer,
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 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. The long session ended
with more robust readings and books exchange, and the most interesting of it
was me exchanging my play, Death and the King’s Grey Hair (about traditional
dictatorship) with a Gambian writer, Hadime Jah’s, who wrote a non-fictive
text, The Fall of Babili Mansa Yahya Jammeh: Africa Endangered by Dictatorship.
In
the next few days I spent in the Gambia after the soiree with the writers, I
had to wear the garb of the tourist, as the Gambia was an extremely tourism
friendly country, with all the infrastructure and superstructure for tourism in
place. I kick-started the tourism leg of my visit to the smiling coast of
Africa with a ride across the River Gambia on a ferry named after the famous
Kunta Kinteh of Alex Haley’s Roots, widely known to be from the village of
Juffureh in the Gambia. The ferry took me and my companion-guide, Bintou, and
another expert guide, Umar, alongside multitude of other persons and vehicles
and trucks across the River Gambia from the Banjul end to another town called
Barra which host Fort Bullen, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
To be continued
Denja Abdullahi, the President of
Association of Nigerian Authors(ANA) was recently in the Gambia
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