By Mathew K Jallow
I had a dream. Not a Martin Luther King Jr. dream. A Mathew Kali Jallow dream! I was home in Gambia and everything looked strange. I was out of my depth. Yet naivety did not take me back. My dream did. Home had turned into a whole new world of conflict and contradictions. And I was caught in its crossfire. I was a sitting duck in the crosshairs in an invisible war that lent pungency to the fear marked on peoples’ faces. Sere kunda was bustling. But not how you think. It was a city in atrophy; the epicenter of a melodrama that was beyond the arch of my imagination. The battle-front had no lines. The war scars everywhere; enshrined in the timid swagger and muffled voices and stares on the hallowed faces of the mosaic and tapestry that is Gambia. The moral limits imposed by social norms left no expression or imprint on the codes of our peoples’ lives. The paradoxically ubiquitous yet invisible mine-field of state power that demands rigid compliance to unreasonable state order, left a blueprint where everyone had to march in lockstep, and retribution against slight, real or imagined, was exercised beyond the forceful use of words. In the quite back-alleys of my old stomping grounds in Dippa kunda, mud-drenched roadside ditches, uncongenial moon-crater pathways and Kilimanjaro-high road bumps, all seem to predicate the institutionalized excesses of state power. The fanciful regurgitation of state grit, monotonous and conspicuous on the airwaves, surpassed the limits of propaganda, to assume the dimension of psychological indoctrination.
Beyond the nastiness of the Ad Hominum propaganda attacks on the national airwaves, even the streets seemed to sense the treacherous subterfuge that consumed the state’s reckless exercise of authority. It seemed the more things had changed, the more they remained the same. The art of reasoning was crowded out by the drought of moral and ethical conventions and robbed people of their dignities. On the nostalgic walk around the back roads Sere Kunda, I was occasionally drowned in the unfolding drama of life before me; often becoming absurdly oblivious of my surroundings. And so, I tripped and stumbled with abhorrent regularity; and in a place where even the subtle nuances in life can be seen to reverberate hostile intent, I seem to have lost the sound track of my life. And everywhere I looked, it seemed even the blighted dirt roadways of Sere Kunda were hostile, furious and totally unwelcoming. The streets seemed to speak to me laconically in an unintelligible, didactic language alphabetized in the characters of fear and terror. As the epitome of a political gadfly, I lost my edge and with it, the veneer of moral sanctimony that defined the proud legacy of freedom and liberty to which I am remorselessly wedded. And so threatening was the state of state power that it ignited the long running pedantic sermons for civility in the political discourse from clerics who had long subordinated their souls to state power. The aberration of the unethical and immoral exacerbated by the brutal ignorance of the state, had a tight grip on power under the spurious rubric of maintaining public order.
As I walked around Sere Kunda in all deliberate haste, my eyes fixed, for no particular reason, on the oncoming mass of humanity, minding my own business, might I add, my calm demeanor did not betray the intense apprehension that consumed my thoughts. But, even in my seeming complacency, what could go wrong was far from my thoughts. I, after all, imagined myself as the Gambian Centurion; with a tint of Wole Soyinka and a tinge of Chinua Achebe; and like T.S Eliot and Fredric Nietzsche, I belong to the pantheon of revered thinkers; making no apology for the depth of my intellectual curiosity. And this is not to be construed as the manifestation of arrogance; nor was it a cavalier show of ostentatiousness. And standing by the dry river bed on the west side of Dippa Kunda, it soon became clear to me that in so many ways, Sere Kunda, was the poster city for everything that went so horribly wrong in Gambia. Gambia was no longer recognizable, and it seemed as if I was in enemy territory, a castaway into a pond where reptilian blood lust threatened to devour me in a frightening pandemonium of carnivorous feasting. It did not matter that I had just returned home, or rather, what I thought was my home, from far away tubabu banko. In the asinine political unorthodoxy so often shamefully displayed in the hostile language of platitudes and rhetorical flourish, even I was a stranger in the backwoods where I lived and played all my life. Not even the fiercely apolitical escaped the wholesale scrutiny and victimization by dint of the frequent episodic bouts of chronic state paranoia that metastasized into absolute lack of sensibilities and objective rationality.
The manifestations of state insecurity so characteristic of the repulsive indiscipline of unchecked power, was exacerbated by the fear of an intensifying groundswell of dissident activity centered on the objective of freeing the Gambia from political tyranny. The state’s adventure into the depths of ignorance has permeated every aspect of life in the Gambian life, and the debilitating consequences of this infirmity have drawn Gambia towards the cusp of inevitable revolutionary political change. The claustrophobic and constricting lack of freedom, mindlessly out of touch with the times, has given rise to the impetus to splurge in a final act of patriotism and defiance; free Gambia from the clutches of tyranny. For starters, Gambians are increasingly transcending the fear that has long immobilized and reduced the citizens to a state of apathy and indifference. In Gambia, the corruption of absolute power is more than just pithy cliché; it is real and it demonstrates the state’s ham-handed political tyranny. But my nighttime experience seemed, to me, more than just a dream; it was real and exposed a subtext of the brutal Yahya Jammeh regime rejected by the Gambian people. For a person who has lived a life of social and political activism, whose life-time experiences that have more than once pushed him into despair, hunger and homelessness, the struggle for political change is a familiar path. The effort to temove Yahya Jammeh or die trying will be the culmination of any Gambians life. For me, it will be the last act of patriotism. My last battle. My last war.