Until in recent times, Kukoie Samba Sanyang, the architect of the abortive July 31, 1981 mutiny in The Gambia, had barely made any headlines at all. He had gone largely mum, but, without question, still cognizant of his standing, if detestable, in the ongoing tell-tale of Gambian history. Gambians can never forget Kukoie. He and the calamitous events he set off in 1981 remain entrenched in the deep recesses of our national memory. Now and again, some of us hearken back to those dark days of 1981, reliving the tragedy and uncertainty of the times. Now and again, we sift through the events, looking for any “context” about what was it that would trigger a failed politician and a ragtag civilian force to attempt to seize power and institute a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
32 years later, we are still getting worked up over the tragedy of 1981 and its main protagonist Kukoie Samba Sanyang. We don’t know whether to love him or hate him. We don’t know who he has become now – as age and ill-health sneak upon his personhood. And we don’t know where he lives. Until his recent Dakar expulsion, few, if any, had any inkling of Kukoie’s whereabouts. He had largely hoarded himself from public consciousness. Anonymity has been his best ally. By dint of his surreptitiousness, Kukoie has built for himself a lot of mythology in the intervening years.
One man has kept us all thinking and guessing for over three decades. What has he been up to? Is he a family man? Was he actually in Liberia during that country’s civil war? Did he train in Libya? Several reports have placed him, at various points in his exile life, in the West African sub-region, partaking of in the Liberian civil war, junketing from capital to capital and living the life of a wastrel. Stephen Ellis, a senior researcher at the African Studies Center, Leiden University, The Netherlands, writes in his book, The mask of anarchy: the destruction of Liberia and the religious dimension of an African Civil War that “Kukoi and his Gambian comrades had been recruited in Havana in 1983 by the Libya’s ambassador to Cuba and sent to Libya for three years of military training.”
While in Libya, Kukoie met with the former Liberian rebel leader-turned-president Charles Taylor, the current Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and a number of other African exiles. They all espoused revolutionary ideals and a desire to uproot corrupt and autocratic regimes in Africa. Museveni left Libya with a number of fighters, but according to Ellis, Kukoi stayed behind. Perhaps an adventure in East Africa did not appeal to him. Perhaps he had set his sights on familiar territory, West Africa, and precisely The Gambia, his native land.
In 1989, Kukoie and his Gambian comrades joined Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia and launched an offensive into that country. Taylor’s group comprised lots of nationalities from other countries in the West African sub-region. “The most prominent of these foreigners,” according to Ellis, “was Kukoi Samba Sanyang a leader of the 1981 coup attempt in Gambia. Sanyang, using the pseudonym Dr. Sarjo Manneh or Dr. Manning was described on his visiting card as the vice president of the NPFL. He took command of the Port of Buchanan after the NPFL had overrun it in May 1990 before retiring the following year to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, after losing influence in the NPFL.”
Kukoie is a gutsy, eloquent fellow, with a knack for speechifying and soap-box populism. But he is no rebel leader – rebel leaders like Jonas Savimbi, John Garang and others had a following and they were territorial. He is not even a renegade like the late South Sudan People’s Liberation Army commander Kerubino Bol. Renegades are popular off-shoots, who are able to build their own mass of support, albeit temporarily. Kukoie is a one-man army, an “insurrectionist”, who has been on the run for half of his life. “I am not a bandit, I am not a terrorist, I am not a blood sucker, I am not a destructive element of Gambian society but a determined patriotic revolutionary freedom fighter, an ardent defender of human rights and social justice who has something great, meaningful and useful to offer and share with the Gambian people,” Kukoie told the Kibaaro News recently.
Kukoie sounds just like his fellow Gambian Mustapha Jalloh, who, according to Ellis, was Taylor’s commander of the very important Liberian-Ivorian border crossing. “In Liberia, he was known as General Kolleh,” but he never wanted to be called a “General” preferring instead the title of a “revolutionary fighter.”
Kukoie and his comrades bathe in the same pond of revolutionary utopia. Africa has seen a number of such personalities, who first claimed to be revolutionaries, but only to turn out the same as, if not worse than, those they removed from power. The records are unedifying: for Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, Yoweri Museveni, Laurent Kabila, Muammar Gaddafy and others. Libya’s revolutionary training grounds, for a nursery, have only produced toxic transplants of far-reaching ecological disasters for the African continent.
As the Banjul dictatorship hardens its grip on Gambian society, Kukoie’s discourse has taken on a new amplification levels. His vociferousness against President Yahya Jammeh and his crystallizations of an ideal Gambian state have endeared him to many Gambians; some are eager for him to set up shop in The Gambia and go after Jammeh. Perhaps it is Kukoie’s ambition to do so. Perhaps he reckons that that might be a way for him to compensate and to rehabilitate his standing with Gambians for the sins of 1981.
But what exactly does Kukoie want? Figuring him out has been like pulling out a tooth. His long-winded writings depict the detached whimsicality of a forlorn, distant dreamer. It may as well be that Kukoie is playing an Orwellian endgame with us: by delivering a steady stream of polemics, tinged with radicalism, he will be able to bring about enough mass disgruntlement in us as to induce a spontaneous uprising against the Gambian leadership – a change from within. George Orwell, in his Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the British genius essays, advocated profusely for a revolution to transform 1940s wartime Britain into a “classless, ownerless” society so that it would, among other societal adjustments, help the country in its war effort against Hitler. “Revolution was not just desirable but necessary … whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place.” He was more clear-cut: “At some point or other it may be necessary to use violence.”
Is Kukoie on the same thinking wavelength? If yes, is violence the answer to the Gambian situation?