Dawda Jawara, 95; founding father, leader of Gambia
Dawda Jawara, a veterinary surgeon who treated cattle in Gambia before helping his tiny West African nation achieve independence from Britain, then presided over its pro-Western, multiparty democracy for 24 years as the country’s first president, died Aug. 27 near Banjul, the capital. He was 95.
His death was confirmed by President Adama Barrow, who said that Jawara made Gambia “a champion of international peace, justice and human rights.” Local media reported that he died at his home in the coastal suburb of Fajara.
Jawara was considered the founding father of Gambia, a narrow country of 2 million dominated by the Gambia River and surrounded on three sides by Senegal. Modest and self-deprecating, he was raised in the nation’s rugged interior and went on to survive a bloody rebellion before being deposed by another coup in 1994.
For seven years, he watched from exile in London as his successor, Yahya Jammeh, steered the country toward the strongman-style rule Jawara had rejected for so long. He was eventually allowed to come home, where he settled with his two wives – legally recognized in Gambia – into a role as an elder statesman and national icon, celebrating Gambia’s 50th anniversary and the recent return to democracy.
The Scottish-educated Jawara was said to be Gambia’s only veterinarian when he began working in the mid-1950s for the British colonial government. “There’s not a cow in the Gambia that doesn’t know me personally,” he once said. That connection to the countryside, and to the civil servants laboring alongside him, helped launch his political career just as independence movements were taking hold across the continent.
Jawara became a leader of the People’s Progressive Party, was elected to Gambia’s House of Representatives in 1960 and became prime minister and head of government two years later. He was instrumental in negotiating the country’s 1965 independence, a milestone he celebrated with a mansa bengo – a traditional “gathering of kings” – that included the Duke and Duchess of Kent, guests from some 30 nations and a coterie of “soothsayers and standard bearers,” according to the BBC.
His efforts earned him a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, the country’s head of state until a referendum made Gambia a republic and Jawara its first president in 1970. He won handily in subsequent elections and generally drew high marks for overseeing an open political culture and free press, with Washington Post journalist Leon Dash writing in 1980 that Gambia was “the only West African nation to combine unruffled independence with genuine, multiparty democratic government.”
Jawara was later praised by Richard Bourne, director of the New Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, who called Gambia “a beacon for human rights in Africa” in a 1994 letter to Britain’s Independent newspaper.