By Amran Gaye
Dear Gambia Soldier / Policeman,
I’ll keep this short – I know there is not much time. You swore, at the beginning of your service, to protect us, citizens of Gambia, against any enemy, internal or external.
We are not that enemy – we do not need protection from ourselves and our choices.
When, at the end of the day, you go home and change out of your uniforms, you see all that we see: a mother here, a girlfriend there, a husband here, a grandmother there, a niece, a nephew, a neighbor who always eats lunch at your house – all the people you love, that you would do anything for. You brew ataaya with them, you sit with them around the lunch bowl. And that act of sharing – whether food or ataaya or the languages we speak – is our joining, as Gambians.
In your circle of loved ones there will be a man, who is related to a woman, whose grandmother was best friends with the father of my father, and whom I am named after. This is a story we can find in each Gambian house, these ties that bind us, mborka to mborka, neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend. To harm one of your own who is innocent and exercising their rights is unacceptable to you.
But to harm any of us is the same as harming any of yours, breaking a link in a chain which connects us all: what we mean when we say we are Gambians, the reason why we introduce ourselves by speaking our family surnames, and finding common stems in our family trees.
The uniform is not your life – it is a job you put on in the morning and take off at day’s end. Being Gambian – that is your life, and the life of every citizen, something we can never strip off. Do not take that life from another when it cries out for justice, do not take it when it wails for freedom. We desire the same things as you.
You have guns – we have none. You have batons and tear gas and rubber bullets and all the other instruments that commit violence against the flesh – we have only our flesh that endures, our voices that protest, our minds that decide, our feet that march, our hands that vote.
We made a decision together and, after the ballots were cast and counted, became one in that decision – that is how democracy works. That decision was only the beginning, but it was made, and where we go now will depend entirely on your actions, as much as it depends on ours. We are not the enemy. You are of us, as we are of you. Do not let anyone turn you against us, especially in an unlawful manner. That is not the pact we made, when we gave you the power to protect us.
Remember: governments come and go, the whims of leaders change, but your holy oath continues to hold. Do what is right by us, by you, by our children who will inherit Gambia after we are gone. We are not enemies, you and us. We are the same, of common cause, and there is no divide, except imagined ones used to turn us against each other.
Do what is right.