We are Gambians!
My friends at the Independent Baba Galleh Jallow and Yorro Jallow, are
undergoing what I did in 1995: The NIA, having failed to frighten me from
writing my weekly pungent column with threats on the phone and on the
streets, resorted to a clandestine investigation into my nationality with a
view to "deporting" me. To where I never imagined. A team of NIA officials
interrogated my parents in Basse to ascertain their nationalities. Daba
Marenah, a callous NIA officer he was, and now shocking as it is, the
commissioner of my home town, was part of the campaign against me, having
once arrested and maltreated me during my first detention at the NIA
headquarters.
I left The Gambia in 1996, an opportune time said my friends and
well-wishers given the unhealthy political environment at the time. My
family told me the NIA agents never came back after my departure. But they
are all the same worried any time I write in the Gambian press. The main
reason why my writings inside The Gambia have scaled down considerably these
days.
The tyranny of government is incalculable in its capacity to inflict harm on
society. Dictatorships are inebriated with a coarseness of behaviour that
makes them culpable yet worry less about the consequences of their
culpability. In 1995, I concluded that the AFPRC could have just kicked me
out into an unknown place, declaring me an "undesirable element." If they
didn't have the authority to do it, they did have the absolute power;it was
a dictatorship. Moreover, "deportation" of citizens would have been
unprecedented in The Gambia but not in a dictatorial system. In the 1970s, a
despotic Nigerian government deported its own citizen Alhaji Suhagba, who
would later challenge the action and win a court verdict.
The Independent editors are facing the frontal assaults of a government
incapable of reasoning and accountability. It is allergic to press freedom.
The Independent is and will always be, a target for its objectivity and
fearlessness. So the only way to inhibit its effective functioning is to
trump up nationality falsities against the paper's editors. Perhaps any
Gambian journalist bearing the last name JALLOW,is subject to the same
immigration treatment. If Mathew K. Jallow, a brilliant writer and now
residing in Wisconsin, were still living in The Gambia, his nationality
would perhaps have also been questioned.
The truth is inescapable: both Baba Galleh and Yorro are Gambians. Damn it!
I am Gambian, too.
Cherno Baba Jallow
Detroit, MI
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