DEAR Annika and All,

Having to hang on to timetables set by capricious and obviously unconcerned
judges is a nightmare of its own. To then hang hope on those timetables -
for one has no other recouse - just for the day to pass without as much as
the courtesy of a proper adjournment by the judge, is total tragedy, worst
than the Greek kind. One would have thought that throwing people in jail and
then abandonning them to the caprices of absent-minded judges, as if such a
hell-hole should be their natural habitat must be just as outrageous to
everyone. But obviously not.

Even without checking my statistics, I know that there is no other Gambian
who has been driven through the gates of the Mile 2 prisons as numerously as
Momodou Dumo Sarho on account of his politcal activism. No other Gambian has
ever endured such intense and wicked assault on his psyche for the sheer
purpose of breaking his spirits; no one in our country has ever experienced
such persistent waves of physical abuse from the powers that be; and no
other Gambian family has had to live with the anguish of continuous terror
of uncertainty about the fate of a rebellious but quintessentially
progressive spirit; the fate of a son, a brother, and husband whose
banihsment from Saint Augustine's High since 1973, has been followed by an
endless crusade to teach, to organise, to support the youth and the poor,
and to organise, to militate against social decadence, reactionary politics
and cultural atavism. Dumo's entire life, up to now, has been completely
usurped by STRUGGLE, in all its concreteness and ambiguity, to such a depth
and purpose that he has ceased possession of the word itself. You cannot
imagine Dumo outside the meaning of the word "struggle".

I canntot think of a single village in Gambia that Dumo does not know; no
Gambian politician whose biography he does not master; no department in the
Gambian state apparat whose head he does not know. Up to 1982, you could not
tell Dumo the registration number of a private car in Banjul and Sere-Kunda
whose owner he is ignorant of. Dumo knows Gambia and Gambians inside out. He
knows  hustlers, bums, businessmen, poiticians, fake revolutionaries, the
intelligentsia, prison warders and jail birds, peasants and dope runners,
and all shades of red-eyed call-me-comrade radicals. He knows the police
informers, CID and Special Branch undercover(!) agents, policemen and their
most fearfully-guarded secrets. Gadding the streets of Sere-Kunda in Dumo's
company is tiresome business: he stands up for almost everyone and almost
everyone stands up for him; so you just wait and wait while he exchages
words with people; in Dumo's company you may reach your destination. But if
you do you always will be behind schedule. He is the type of person people
pretend to know well after hearing of him once. His verbal skills are
unmatched, eclipsing even those of Suslov - Leonid Bhreznev's propaganda
secretary. Dumo's sophistication in Gambia's cultural milieu is simply
amazing....
(In 1995 we met in Gambia. After visiting my wife at Bakau NewTown, he
talked me into passing by an auntie of his. The old woman lives just behind
the Police Depot. As soon as the initual ritual of salutations were over,
the old woman and Dumo plunged into what was for me uncahrted seas. They
talked about the uncles in London and Leeds, the sisters still at Leman and
Perseverance streets, the nieces and nephews in different states in the U.S
and all the major and minor relations weaved together into this complex
lineage. It went on for hours. I was stupefied and I got hungry. The old
woman spoke like she never spoke before, enlivened by Dumo's soothing
evocation of old memories. She spoke of her children, her children's
children, her siblings and their spouses and offspring. She spoke of distant
cousins and aunts and how these were related to other families. She narrated
the matrilineal links with other families and their geographic origins. When
we finally had to leave, Dumo's aunt could only suppress tears with great
dificulty. She immensely enjoyed teaching us some oral history and practical
sociology, betraying a deep-seated emotional urge to narrate. In
restrospect, it was an extraordinary experience for me, one that illustrated
how Africa's "history of ordinary people" simply fades into memory, into
dissolved biographies, dismembering our modern notions of "knowing where one
comes from"; whole lives, and legends, and narratives imploding into
colourless "by-the-ways".

While the rest of us have gone on building families and getting on with
mundane carreers, blunting, corrupting and compromising our instinct to
struggle, Dumo has remained staunch and unmalleable, breathing energy into
the very notion of long-term continous struggle; the struggle against
everything that is backward in our political culture and for everything that
means progress in our society.

Three years ago there was much activity waged in his behalf and that of his
co-detainees. With time and repeated frustration over his fake trials
energies sapped in the process, as all of us grew helpless as we agonised
over his fate. But Dumo is unbreakable; partly because he is not just an
individual. Dumo has developed into an instituion, commanding the spirited
energy for a free Gambia. It is precisely his enormous zeal for a life
charged with meaning, for a better Gambia that must keep the rest of us
going on to struggle for our own sake and for his immediate release and the
release of his co-detainees from unjust imprisonment.

FREE DUMO SARHO NOW!!!

Sidibeh


From: "Annika Renberg" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 7:15 PM
Subject: The "Dumo trial"


For your information:
Today was the day scheduled for the long awaited ruling in the 3½ year old
treason case against the remaining detainees Ebrima Barrow, Dumo Sarho and
Ebrima Yarboe.
Nothing happened though - Justice Belghore seems to have travelled abroad on
un urgent mission for some (five?) weeks. He did not even have time to set a
new date before he left.
Annika Renberg
(Dumo's wife)

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