End of era for brutal madman
KUNTA Kinte, the young Mandinka lad from the village of Jufure in Gambia, was a strong and freedom-loving man. When he was captured and taken to the US as a slave, he resisted both the capture, the crossing in the ship and even the enslavement once he was in the US.
His life and story was the centrepiece of the epic book and film Roots, written by Alex Haley. Kunta refused to bow to slavery; named his one child Kizzy; and followed as much as was possible his Islamic faith in the face of a process designed to obliterate a slave’s identity, norms, culture and belief systems.
He was the epitome of refusing to give up in the face of not overwhelming odds, but simply impossible odds. Kunta came flooding into my mind on Friday when it was announced that Yahya Jammeh, the mad man and dictator of Gambia for 22 years, had been voted out of office.
This man, whose full title was His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus Junkung Jammeh Naasiru Deen Babili Mansa and Chief Custodian of the Sacred Constitution of the Gambia, once said he would rule for a billion years if Allah so wished,
“Dr” Jammeh styled himself as a doctor who could cure Aids with a medication that worked only on Thursdays, using banana leaves that would be placed on the patient’s torso.
He ruled Gambia like a personal fiefdom where even the price of bread could be changed by his say-so.
He is a brutal man who used a paramilitary gang known as Jungulers to effect extra-judicial killings, disappearances and abductions of civilians and military officers seen as a threat to his rule. While political opponents were the main targets, critical journalists also bore the brunt of his short fuse. Three of them are worth mentioning. Deyda Hydara, founder and editor-inchief of The Point newspaper in Banjul, the capital, was 58 in December 2004 when he was shot dead while driving home from a party to celebrate the 13th anniversary of the paper.
A fierce critic of authoritarianism, he wrote a column titled “Good Morning President”, through which he criticised the abuse of power by Jammeh. He received many death threats, and his death came just days after he had opposed, in court, a law passed by Jammeh that, among other outrageous restrictions on the media, mandated that publishers’ homes had to be attached as security when registering a newspaper.
A founder member of The African Editors Forum (TAEF), Hydara had also been a correspondent for AFP and Reporters Sans Frontières.
A member of the Jungulers later revealed that Hydara had been ambushed and sandwiched between two taxis and shot on the instructions of Jammeh. Hydara’s murder caused a huge international outcry, but it was never properly investigated, leading to the court of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) to rule that the government should compensate the family. Jammeh ignored the ruling. TAEF declared Hydara a hero of African media in 2010.
The second case is that of Chief Ebrima Manneh, a senior reporter of the Daily Observer newspaper, whose beat was covering the president. He was abducted from his office by two men who identified themselves as intelligence officers from the presidency on July 7, 2006 and was never seen again.
Despite numerous appeals for his release, it is now 10 years since, and many have presumed him dead. A former sen- ior intelligence officer has since alleged that Manneh had been tortured extensively and that his arrest had been prompted by the journalist’s attempt to run a story on human rights abuses just after the African Union had completed its summit in Gambia.
His case has been to the Ecowas Court, which ordered Jammeh to produce Manneh, but again to no avail. Like Hydara, Manneh was also declared a hero of African media by TAEF in 2010.
Then there is Musa Saidykhan, the editor of The Independent, who was detained in September 2005 and tortured to near death. He lost consciousness for so long that his torturers assumed him dead and had ordered prisoners to dig his grave behind the prison when he came to.
His newspaper offices and printing centre were fire-bombed several times, leading him at one point to produce his paper on stapled A4 papers printed on a desktop printer. Saidykhan’s detention followed a report he had written after attending a TAEF meeting in Joburg where he had asked then president Thabo Mbeki to inter- vene in the cases of Hydara and Manneh and about general repression.
He eventually went into exile in Senegal and later to the US, where he is a refugee, joining about 40 percent of Gambian journalists who operate from exile.
These are journalists such as Ndey Tapha Sosseh, who now lives in Mali but was in Malawi on assignment when it was announced on Friday that Jammeh had been toppled in an election. She dropped the assignment and said: “Heading back home tomorrow”.
She added: “This is indeed a fitting tribute to Deyda Hydara and Chief Ebrima Manneh. It is also a fitting tribute to all those exiled Gambians, all those Gambians who were killed just for daring to oppose, and for Ousainou Darboe and the hundreds of other opposition supporters who have had their rights and dignity stripped.
It is a fitting tribute to each and every Gambian who has had to live in fear, in self-censorship, gagged to the very end. It is also an indicator that the work done by each and every one of you at Article 19, TAEF, the Nobert Zongo Centre etc was not in vain.
Indeed, there are other heroes such as Ousman Sillah, the editor at Foroyaa newspaper, who stuck it out and worked the system from within Gambia, risking their lives with every story they wrote. Three years ago, Sillah met President Jacob Zuma in his office to raise the issue of repression in Gambia, requesting Zuma to intervene.
Gambia’s abuses were particularly appalling as it is the headquarters of the African Commission for Human and People’s Rights, which is the continent’s custodian of human rights.
The irony of the situation came to a head when the commission celebrated its 20th anniversary and chairperson Pansy Tlakula was faced with protests from civil-society groups calling for a boycott.
Now that Jammeh is going, the wounds and scars of repression, the agony and the pain of not knowing where missing and abducted relatives are or the absence of justice for those killed have been reopened.
And as a new Gambia emerges from the excesses of the madman, led by Adama Barrow, it cannot be built on the foundation of impunity.
Punishment for crimes against humanity must be pursued, and just as in Burkina Faso, where the killers of Thomas Sankara are to be tried, so too it must be for Jammeh and his cohorts.
When that happens, we will all know that a new dawn has indeed broken over Kunta Kinte’s land.