NY FIRE SHATTERS HEART OF LIVELY COMMUNITY
Haven for Gambian migrants turns into deathtrap taking 17 lives.
When Abdoulie Touray, then a 41-year-old Gambian diamond trader, settled in the Bronx in the 1970s, the area was blighted by crime and the West African community was tiny. There were no restaurants serving okra stew, no funeral parlours providing proper Islamic rites, and no nearby mosques.
An erudite Islamic scholar by night, Touray moved into a third-floor apartment in a new 19-storey building known as Twin Parks North West. Soon, he was offering a place to stay, food, contacts for jobs and the occasional verse from the Quran to newcomers from his homeland.
Virtually overnight, an entire community sprouted up around him. And the building became a kind of homeland-in-exile for Gambians fleeing oppressive dictatorship and crushing poverty. Visitors to Touray’s apartment later became tenants of the building at 333 E 181st St. A dozen mosques opened. Hair braiding salons popped up, as did supermarkets selling varieties of fufu; bottles of Vimto, a soft drink popular in West Africa; and canned eggplant. Twin Parks North West gained a new nickname: Touray Tower.
Then on Sunday, in just minutes, what had been a haven for many Gambians quickly turned into a deathtrap as smoke from a fire killed 17 people, including eight children.
“This community has grown to what it is today because of that building, and that is why it’s very special to us,” said Haji Dukuray, 60, who arrived in 1988 to study business administration, with a single suitcase and knowing just one address, the one in the Bronx. “When they said on the news, ‘Fire at 333—,’ I said, ‘It’s the Touray Tower!’”
Nearly all of the victims were of Gambian or of West African descent. There were the Drammehs — Fatoumata and her three children. There were the Dukurays, Hajie and Haja and their three children. There was Fatoumata Tunkara and her 6-year-old son Omar Jambang. The Touray family knew nearly all of the victims. Several were their cousins.
The Touray family had grown since the patriarch first arrived on the scene; his 20th grandchild was born last year.
Although Touray died in 2019 at age 81 of heart failure, about 50 members of the immediate and extended family were living in the building at the time of the fire, said one of his sons, Suleyman Touray, and Mariama Touray, who is married to one of his nephews.
Following the norms of his culture and religion, Abdoulie Touray had three Islamic-law wives who still lived in the apartment on the third floor. Two of his widows were placed in hotels; the third had been visiting Gambia at the time of the fire.
Born in Sotuma Sere, a village in Eastern Gambia, Abdoulie Touray moved to the country through a programme for “young democrats”, his daughter Fatiah Touray, 38, said. Abdoulie Touray was well-travelled and spoke at least nine languages: English, French, Arabic, Soninke, Mandingo, Fulani, Wolof, Lingala and Sierra Leonean Creole. On arriving in the United States, he started a non-profit called the Pan-African Islamic Society out of his apartment and offered Islamic services to celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Cicely Tyson, according to family members.
“He realised that there was no real place where West Africans could get their proper funeral rites as Muslims, and he was really instrumental in getting that started for the Muslim community,” said Magundo Touray, 41, one of his daughters.
To many, Touray Tower, as so many called it, felt like an extension of family back home, and it was easy to understand why: Gambia is the smallest country in continental Africa, with fewer than 2 million people living on a strip of land squeezed inside Senegal, with just the tip jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. Just 8,000 or so Gambians live in all of the United States, according to US Embassy data, many of them in New York City.
In Gambia, “everybody is related; everybody knows everybody”, said Dawda Docka Fadera, Gambia’s ambassador to the United States, who met survivors a day after the blaze. “So our country is in shock.”
Touray, like many of his successors, arrived in New York just as large-scale immigration from Gambia to the United States took off in the 1970s, following independence from Britain in 1965 and after it became a republic in 1970.
The United States and Gambia have ties going back to World War II, when Gambian troops fought with the Allies in Burma, and Banjul, the capital, served as a stop for the US Army Air Corps and a port of call for Allied naval convoys.