The late mutineer’s place in the national narrative is assured, but sullied, nonetheless.
By Cherno Baba Jallow
By a quirk of fate, the self-described Gambian “revolutionary freedom fighter” Kukoie Samba Sanyang had to die, not in a war zone, but in a hospital ward. Partaking in the ghastly Liberian civil war and having lived a life perilously close to violent death, times inestimable, perhaps the mastermind of the 1981 abortive coup in The Gambia could take solace from the fact that his was a “peaceful” death not a grisly one – one characterized by bloodbath in a war zone or one accustomed to those who lived by the gun or who flirted with and careered off, armed confrontations.
Kukoie, who died recently in Mali following deportation from Senegal for alleged subversive activities against the Gambian Government, could still invoke puzzlement even in death. He was fittingly buried in Dakar, the very place that had desecrated his stay there only a few weeks earlier. Without question, it wasn’t the way he would have wished: dying in a foreign land and under circumstances reported as impoverished. But, inferring from his natural disposition, Kukoie would have been more concerned about the former. “I want to be near my people,” he told the BBC shortly after his forcible arrival in Bamako. His outcry captured the instability of his environment. Even as he tried to be ubiquitous, through his treatises and in the freewheeling world of Cyberspace, Kukoie existed practically on the margins of Gambian society. He was a man largely on the run, more concerned about perfecting survival gambits or dealing with an acute curtailment in personal health than being the “revolutionary freedom fighter” he claimed to be – or wanted us believe.
Other than a discernible love, and plenty of it, for his native country, there was a lot of façade about Kukoie. Or better yet, there were a lot of discrepancies about him, his outlook on matters of state and governance. He wanted to be seen as a man of the people, but he largely remained an enigma, an occupant in the peripheries of public imagination. He believed in people-power, but yet he feigned at the democratic rudiments of elections and popular consent. He idealized a truly “liberated” state, but getting there – and as was his wont – by violent means, only obliterate, not liberate, the state. He abhorred killings, perpetuated in the name of political power, but yet his actions, directly or indirectly, contributed to mass killings. Talk of the mutiny of 1981.
Over three decades ago, Kukoie, leading a ragtag army of civilians and ex-Field Force officers, momentarily seized power from the democratically-elected government of former president Alhaji Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara. Kukoie called the July 31, 1981 rebellion a “genuine people’s revolution.” But a revolution it wasn’t. It was a power-grab motivated by disgruntlement at the seeming impossibility of dislodging the existing order through democratic means. Added to this was the toxic atmosphere within the Gambian Field Force where, as the retired UK’s Birmingham University’s professor and writer on the 1981 coup Arnold Hughes has noted, grievances against a perceived “Banjul Wollof-Aku” dominance, reached dangerous levels leading to a coalescing of factors hastening the mutiny of 1981.
Kukoie and some sympathizers of the July 31, 1981 rebellion have always pointed to corruption and economic crisis under the PPP-led government at the time as reasons for wanting to overthrow status quo. But observers, including Prof. Hughes, have argued that compared to other African countries at the time, corruption in The Gambia had not reached such endemic levels. This is noteworthy given that The Gambia was still a fledgling country, having been only independent for 16 years, a short-span for any country, still unbuckling itself from the trammels of colonialism, to lay aground rock-solid institutional structures for propriety in governance.
What about economic crisis? The Gambia, to be sure, had a number of economic problems, but the country wasn’t alone. By the beginning of 1980 and well into the middle of the decade, several African economies were still reeling from the aftershocks of the 1979 world oil crisis. Inflation, scarcities, budget deficits, declines in per capita GDP and other macroeconomic problems ran rampant in the West Africa sub-region and elsewhere. Although at great costs to individual incomes and public expenditures relative to employment and services, Jawara’s Economic Recovery Program (ERP) and the Program for Sustainable Development (PSD) policies would later navigate The Gambia through those bleak economic storms of the 1980s.
The incidents of July 31, 1981 further roughened Gambian economic affairs. It disrupted business and public livelihood. Shortages, and lootings of private businesses, ran amok in the Greater Banjul Area. The pulse of the national economy registered a downward trajectory, even if momentarily.
But the mutiny of July 31 was more consequential for its threat to national peace. Estimates put the number of deaths at 500 or higher. Public order came to a screeching halt. Guns fell into the hands of civilians, most, if not all, nary an experience in how to aim or shoot. The gates of the Mile II prisons were opened, letting dangerous convicts loose on the population. Residents of the Greater Banjul Area, feeling besieged, got caught up in a Hobbesian scenario: with a national government in disarray and absent, power, devoid of authority, held sway – and menacingly. With bloodletting on the upswing and scattershot, The Gambia would have been done in had the Senegalese not intervened. There was a possibility, if transitory, that well before other countries in the West African sub-region, we would have been the first to come to familiarity with, the destructive capacities of civil wars as witnessed in the 1980s and 90s.
Kukoie balked at accusations that he and his group took part in the killings during the abortive coup. He told the online publication Freedom that “we could have not killed our own people we were struggling to liberate and redeem for their survival.” He sounded credibly believable. There is no evidence that Kukoie took part in any killings or orchestrated others to do so. Had the hostages been killed, he wouldn’t have escaped blame. But blameworthy he still is – for triggering a chain of reactive forces that brought The Gambia close to the brink of total collapse.
It is not only about what he orchestrated but also what might have been. Apart from wanting to create for The Gambia, what he, borrowing from someone in distant history, called “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, Kukoie’s plans lacked both the moral clarity and intellectual ballast necessary for any renewal in national awakening. Ideas on matters of governance, and wisdom in the management of public affairs, couldn’t be had in a band of illiterates and taxi drivers led by a man hardly in control of events and possessed of a mind consumed by the squalls of dogma. Revolutionary dogma subsumed in Marxian regurgitations. With weak institutions and in a micro state like The Gambia, Kukoie would have easily ridden roughshod over the Gambian population if, in fact, he were to survive the curveballs of his mutiny.
“History,” he told Freedom, “will absolve us for what happened in The Gambia on the 31st of July 1981 which was a genuine people’s revolution and not an infantile foolery.” This is a stretch, an incipient misreading of the future. Years hence, there still would be no other way of looking at the mutiny of July 31 except for what it was, is: unnecessary and a stain on Gambian history. But sometimes, in the fullness of time, and when events reach their fated cycles, new understandings, contexts and appreciations emerge out of long-held perceptions and views. Still.
Coming years will not guarantee Kukoie that he would be a recipient of the rehabilitation opportunities of history.