Getting Inside the Tyrant’s Mind

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Democracy, it is often said, is the tyranny of the majority. It is a political arrangement in which the majority elects representatives who then make and impose laws on the minority, whether the minority likes such laws or not. But it is universally acknowledged that a well-ordered democracy with the necessary checks and balances to prevent abuse of power is the best-known form of government. The situation becomes tricky when there is but a semblance of democracy, when there are no checks and balances, and where the elected representatives lack the personal wisdom and integrity to do the right thing and abstain from abusing their powers.

Empirical evidence shows that men are never to be trusted to act honorably, particularly when they are in a position to indulge their appetites and promote their prejudices without fear of consequences. It is generally agreed that however well meaning human beings are, they are only just to the extent that they fear some sort of punishment or retribution if they act unjustly. If people acquire power, particularly power over a whole nation, and there is nothing to stop them from getting corrupt and unjust, either in their own personalities or by way of legal checks and balances, they are very likely to grow gross in their deeds and actions. It is through such a corruption of the human soul that the tyranny of the minority is born and gradually transformed into the tyranny of the individual tyrant.

In order to defeat the tyrant, we need to get inside his mind and see how he thinks, what makes him tick, why he acts the way he does. Tyranny is a state of mind that is born and bred by men’s greed and selfishness. If men in power ignore the urgings of their reason and choose to follow their base desires because they feel they can, the devil moves in, resides in their hearts, and enslaves their souls and they are transformed into tyrants. They then embark on their descent into hell by the works of their gnarled hands. They are afflicted by the blindness of the heart, a blindness that all the great Books of God warn against. Their miserable predicament is all the more tragic because they are not conscious of their stone blindness. And so they lurch, rumble, and stumble madly on to their rendezvous with merciless fate. 

An elected minority, like Mr. Jammeh and his cohorts, knowing that those who elected them are really not in any position to control or punish them, begin abusing their power. Under the infallible leadership of the self-anointed demi-god, they throw all care to the winds and employ every sort of conceivable device to deceive, oppress and silence the people. They steal and get rich, lie and lavish goodies to blind the minds of the people. When they are adequately corrupted and stripped of all honor and integrity, the would-be tyrant would start eliminating his former associates one by one - as Jammeh has eliminated Sana Sabally Sadibou Hydara, Edward Singhateh, Alhagi Kanteh and other former top brass in the military ruling council. The tyrant eliminates all potential competition for power and attention so that in a short while, he would the only surviving member of his former companions, thus beginning the rapid transition into fully-fledged tyranny. The tyrant is gradually transformed, by his greed and insatiable lust for power, into a hideous monster in human skin. He would lose all sense of proportion and would see himself as the very paragon of virtue and righteousness, thanks to his evil persona aided by swarms of creeping and cringing sycophants groveling at his feet at every moment of his waking life.

The tyrant, like all human beings, has an almost inexhaustible list of profligate desires. But unlike most people, he is in a position to satisfy them. These desires enslave the tyrant’s soul, harden his heart, blind his mind and corrupts his reason. His becomes an impotent vehicle for the satisfaction of his insatiable desires. He loses all sense of proportion and is habitually given to excess and extravagance in a futile effort to feel some false sense of freedom and security. But the tyrant never feels free or secure. Drowned in a suffocating sea of crippling paranoia, he is perpetually in a state of fright, dejected and disgruntled because nothing he does satisfies his cravings for peace or fills the emptiness in his soul.

Thus mentally shackled and insecure, the tyrant sets about making sure he stays in power forever. He crippling paranoia grows increasingly and he feels danger in the very air he breathes. A fly buzzing near him is harshly whacked and trampled upon for fear that it is sent by one of his many imaginary enemies. A lizard that dashes before him in the morning sends him scurrying back indoors to pour libations to ward the evil off. If he dreams of a dog, he immediately sacks the first security chief to hit his mind in the morning and gets him arrested and locked up. For the tyrant, a dog in his dreams is a sure sign of an evil plot against him. A bad dream, which becomes a frequent occurrence in his life, is always a warning that something bad was going to happen to him and therefore a signal that someone needs to be stopped. He becomes a shaking bundle of crippling fear. While he struts proudly around in pansive garbs, wielding strange objects to appear mysterious and powerful, and espousing strange philosophies to appear wise, the tyrant is in reality a fool and a coward, a bundle of fright and ignorance who is no longer in control of himself, a personification of evil itself whose dark mind is incapable of seeing nothing but illusions and dangers lucking in every space of the world. The tyrant is weak and hollow, shrinking and drying up inside like the scooped-out trunk of a long dead tree.

Because he is so dull and incapable of constructive thought, the tyrant hates all clever persons. He is jealous of bright intellect and seeks to snuff out the light of truth and wisdom, wherever it shines. An intellectual dwarf of embarrassing proportions, the tyrant tries to make a tabula rasa of the society he lords it over. He seeks to fashion a society of mental midgets shorter than himself. He draws a line at the level of his shoulders above which no man must rise. If one happened to be taller than the tyrant’s shoulders, one either learns to walk in a stoop or is cut down to size. Hypocrites and parasites, always eager to please the tyrant, take to crawling on their bellies like poisonous reptiles, cringing and fawning and asking him questions he likes to hear and giving him the impression that he is indeed the greatest man alive. They will ask him questions like: ‘My Lord, what do you say to all those stupid folks who pretend to be wise and make funny noises?’ And the tyrant would reply: ‘Authenticité, authenticité. If I get hold of them I will make them know who I am.’ He talks this way because force is the only concept the tyrant is capable of understanding.  Then, when the tyrant falls, as he must one day, those cringing reptiles with the long mouths and forked tongues will call him fool and rush to occupy new space at the feet of the new powerful.

The tyrant, hiding behind the fake cloak of righteousness and justice, makes unjust laws or breaks all just laws to silence all critical voices. He resorts to telling stinking lies, recalling non-existent memories, citing phantom examples, demonizing all who disagree with him, and uttering uncouth threats in a vain effort to justify the unjustifiable. Being in a position to castigate, and edged along by shameless flunkies with long poisonous tongues and repressed consciences, the tyrant expresses his rage at all so-called enemies of the nation, preaching the gospel according to St. Power. His nostrils flaring and his forked tongue constantly flicking out, the tyrant spits endless potions of venom at all who dare to challenge his words or deeds, however misguided, however wrong, however unjust and ridiculous, however damaging to the nation. But in spite of all his so-called power and all the privileges he enjoys, the tyrant is ultimately a very miserable creature. A man obsessed with making other men’s lives miserable cannot but be miserable himself, because he is the very fountain from which misery flows out to the people he oppresses. He is the very source of the nation’s misery, the cancer that is eating up the body politic. And he knows it. But he cannot accept it. Eventually, though, he will be forced to. Let him ask the many tyrants of history. They all tried to run away from their miserable fates by trampling down on the innocent and the weak, by trying to derail the train of time. And they all crashed right into their miserable fates when they least expected it. So it has been. So shall it be again. It is an immutable law of nature that human beings must reap what they sow.

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