The spectacle could not have been more auspicious – decorated banquet tables set against the festive backdrop of glittering ticker tape at State House in Banjul, the scene of an evening banquet on the eve of independence day.
The Gambian capital bedecked in bunting is one of the few focal points of celebrating six decades of political independence on Tuesday February 18th captioned in celebratory parlance as the Diamond Jubilee.
Elsewhere members of the police brass band looking spick and span in navy blue have been polishing their instruments throughout February to provide the musical centerpiece of the celebrations of an improbable country created to follow the course of a river flowing inland.
After three presidents – Dawda Jawara, the founding father who is now late, Yahya Jammeh another languishing in exile and Barrow, the third who made history by defeating an incumbent, The Gambia has come a long way from being a country with no treasury save that which the departing British had left in the national kitty, no airport worth the name, no television station or university of any kind, one main hospital located in Banjul, a few kilometers of tarred stretches skirting around largely dirt countryside. Gambia’s population was barely 300, 000 with a literacy rate of under 2 percent. The first cabinet of ministers was a rag tag bunch of semi literate adventurers who could barely read and write or streamline government policy and operations.
In those early days addresses on mails through the post routinely mistaken the Southern African country of Zambia, which had won independence months earlier in October 1964 for the young, unremarkable nation in West Africa. To end this confusion what was devised was simply adding the definite article The to the country’s official name and distinguish it from Zambia. Then Prime Minister Jawara had written to the Committee on Geographical Names making a request to that effect which was granted.
Since she saw the last of British colonial statecraft, The Gambia has witnessed its finest hours as a polity where democracy thrived in the intervening years after independence before foundering under a ”militocratic” dispensation where strongman rule held sway. By the skin of its teeth, she had also survived the worst in her history in the shape of an abortive coup in 1981 when an unquantifiable number of people had died in a bloodbath still unsurpassed in its horrific essence 44 years later.
During this period an experiment at a confederal arrangement was tested with neigbouring Senegal with which The Gambia shares historical, cultural and filial bonds which predate the advent of the borders as they are today. Dissimilar colonial experiences under the British in the case of The Gambia and France in respect of Senegal however drove the wedge which was the main undoing of the Senegambia confederation between 1982 and 1989. This difference was skin deep and proved insurmountable, defying valiant bids to unite the two countries.
But the cross-border bonds while occasionally tested have survived and the two states of Gambia and Senegal following a cue from their peoples are today closer than they ever were.
To underline this filial attachment, Senegal’s head of state Bassirou Diomaye Faye took his place as the special guest of honour as Bissau-Guinean President Umar Sissoco Embalo also showed up.
Wedged precariously inside Senegal, The Gambia’s peculiar geography has inspired writers of all perspectives in their description of the nascent nation. Their portrayals went along the lines of the bizarre, snake-like, worm-shaped, skinny and ugly bulge all effortlessly pressing home the point that its shape was like that of no other nation in the world.
In his 1967 book “Enter Gambia, the Birth of an improbable nation” Berkeley Rice mocks the then newly independent nation as one with possibly a short life span thanks to its size which made a mockery of its claim to viability with much bigger Senegal waiting to snap it up eventually. Having witnessed the country’s first year of independence, the American writer’s book sums up the prospects of a small, poor, oddly-shaped country as virtually non-existent at best. The book’s conclusions are based on research papers and on-the-trot interviews Rice conducted with Gambians and others while journeying through the country at a precarious juncture of its political history.
The nation Rice witnessed 60 years ago would be hardly recognisable from the 21st century Gambia that has been shaped by both highs and lows to confound post-independence skeptics by proving through the course of sixty years that their early misgivings while unsurprising were somewhat exaggerated from the vantage point of hindsight.
What began as an improbable nation born from the diminishing embers of colonialism, has withstood the test of time. To its citizens the unextinguished torch of nationhood while burning throughout these long years, represents her greatest triumph even when the natural aspirations for economic development remain largely elusive – unfulfilled.