(1940-1951)

By

Dr Pierre Gomez

Senior Lecturer and HoD

Division of Humanities and Social Sciences

University of The Gambia

Dabbali Gi relates the colonial socio-politico-economic life of The Gambia, which Baaba Sillah literary baptizes in this novel as Kataminaland. In fact, for such a novel that is heavily interlarded with beacons of protest, nothing can be more fitting than to see this protest being reflected in the opener. For the benefit of our non-wollofophone readers, we consider it appropriate to interpret the term Dabbali Gi. It denotes ‘slavery’ but of an oblique type. The kind of slavery practiced in traditional agrarian communities where the peasant would secure a loan from some unscrupulous local shop keepers with the strong promise of paying in crop during the harvest season. And if the loan cannot be offset at the appointed time on account of crop failure, the farmer is obliged to secure a new loan from the same local shopkeeper, heaping up loans upon loans. This will sometimes go on to a point where the farmer has no alternative but to flee away from home (Bajaan in chapter7). What is unsavoury in all this is that, it is the shopkeeper who single-handedly decides the quantity of groundnuts he should be paid in return for his help. There is no room for bargaining.It is a sorry state reminiscent of serfdom during the Middle Age in Europe; it is a sorry state that leads to a much sorrier state of self-exile. Put otherwise, Dabbali Gi is a kind of socio-economic inferno in which the Gambian peasant is scorched dry by his own brother.

However, one is tempted to assume that the author uses the whole Dabbali Gi phenomenon as a spring board to make inroads into the legendary double diabolical abuse and misuse of the Gambian by his colonial master during the century. It holds true that the colonial experience is a hackneyed theme that runs through the length and breath of a great number of literary works thrown into the book traffic after independence (starting from Batoula by Réné Maran down to Dabbali Gi). For this reason, one cannot resist the temptation to question the usefulness of Dabbali Gi in the world of letters. We do not indeed believe that there is any sacrosanct dispensation anywhere proscribing the exploitation of a given thematic by writer Z because writers A, B, C and D have already worked copiously on it. Presentations made by different people on the same theme remain different if not in content, but at least in style. Besides, before reading this novel, how much did we factually know about the abuse of the Gambian by forces from within and without? If the answer is ‘Not much”, then Dababali Gi is the book to read to cure ourselves of the semi blindness we have been suffering from regarding our national history.

It also stands to reason that Baaba Sillah’s purpose of writing this novel transcends the concern to educate the reader on the history of The Gambia, or perhaps, the attempt to put all the blame on the colonial master for all our woes and throes as our forefathers too had their own part in the molestation of the African; beyond these concerns, he goes to great lengths in trying to impress on our minds the importance of unity in diversity which is the main pillar of true nationhood. It is tolerable to be of different convictions, but obviously not to allow alien forces to poison our national unity. This will not fail to impact negatively on the fight for the common good. On the prompting of the devil, Graham (he is the only fictional name in the book and represents a leading politician in the 40s) decamps from Eddu Fara Bundaw’s formidable movement to form the Young Muslims Association.

“…my most ardent protégé, who I have kept under my wing since 1935, has traded his Pan African ideals with narrow nationalism. A major part of the sea-change in him stems squarely from a predatory tendency, that he skillfully guised under the cloak of ethnicity and religion. He struck out on his own from the Kataminaland Labour Union under the umbrella of the Young Muslim Society.” (pp. 238)

We shall begin the discussion of the novel’s subject matter with the degradation and exploitation of the Gambian by forces from within and without; that is to say, we shall survey together how the Gambian is tortured and extorted by indigenous sovereigns as well as by the colonial master. Our second part shall constitute an assessment of the divide-and-rule strategy employed by the colonial master to destroy the political unity of Gambian intelligentsia in order to consolidate and sustain his sovereignty on his Gambian subordinates. The third part is a quick analysis of Baaba Sillah’s style as is seen in the novel. Since the subtle role assigned to us is to whip up in you the interest to read this book.

Fully assuming the implicit role of the writer as the mouthpiece of the voiceless, Baaba Sillah does not spare any effort to objectively evoke the injustices brought to bear upon the ordinary man, not to say the Gambian peasant, first by his compatriot and then by the colonial master. We alluded to the extortion he suffers at the hands of the local trader in our abstract and do not therefore intend to make a long treatise on it. For, compared with the atrocities orchestrated against him by the Serpent King (chapter 17), Dabbali Gi issue is a very infinitesimal one. We hold it against the local trader because we see him behave like the colonial master who fixes the prices of what one buys from the colonized and how much he is going to sell the finished product to him. It is a one-man show that leaves no bargaining room for the colonized. We will rather examine the conduct of Salmoŋ Faye, the Serpent King, who takes a strange delight in instituting terror in his kingdom not only by dishing out iron-handed treatment to his people, but also by literarily sacrificing the blood of his subjects to maintain himself unshakably in his royal position. I will quote extensively from the text for us to have the full import of this king’s madness:

Because of his cruel actions, parents lost children and children lost their parents. Husbands and wives were separated in the blink of an eye, never to meet again. Friends parted company in haste, without knowing that it was for the very last time. That life, under Salmoŋ Faye, was terrible and his people loathed both it and him. At the end, the land and the people he ruled were wrenched apart. They were consumed by inconsolable sadness, weariness, despondency and privation. (172)

Whenever a crow or a vulture perched on a branch of a special tree in his farm, Salmoŋ Faye saw it as an omen of some sort. So he decided that a beard should be given to the birds as an offering to prevent evil from befalling him or his kingdom. Therefore, a bearded man would be brought to him and the man’s bearded and flesh from his cheeks and chin were sliced off for the birds. The vultures and crows soon became accustomed to picking over these human delicacies – the flesh of men’s faces – whenever they became tired of feasting on animal carcasses. (172).

And as if this is not enough,

Sometimes, says Grandma, he wanted to see how a baby lay inside its mother’s abdomen so he ordered pregnant ladies to be brought to him. He then opened their abdomens completely, leaving them to die there on the ground. (173)

And still according to Grandma,

Salmoŋ Faye was an extraordinary ruler…He was a truly evil man and no one dared say anything against him. Only after his death was an agreement reached by his subjects and griots alike, that he was a man who held some strange and mixed perceptions about himself and his kingdom. He was delusional and suffered from the deeply held view that he was being persecuted to the extent that he became a paranoid schizophrenic (171/2).

It is difficult to believe this if in her narration Grandma does not shed tears.This inexplicable inhumanity can only be paralleled by King Pharaoh, who had all the male children born within a specified period killed because it was revealed to him that one of them would cause his demise. It is a story we are all conversant with, I believe, and we know how Pharaoh ended. But while Pharaoh was punished by God alone, in Dabbali Gi, Solmoŋ Faye is exterminated by his own people and God sealed this punishment with a miracle that may not surpass the one He used to settle scores with Pharaoh, but enough to serve as a deterrent to any ruler whose intention it is to see his subjects as worthless objects to be disposed of at will:

Maama Alla’s anger descended on him, and after his death a strange thing happened. It might have been by accident – or someone might have carried out that deed – we don’t know which. Salmoŋ Faye’s grave was engulfed by a huge ball of flame one night. The flames lit up the sky and landscape for days. When the fire eventually died out, bushes of red, hot poisonous peppers rose out of the ashes and grew all over his grave. Just as strange was the fact that even the most voracious pepper-loving birds would not eat the strange plants or their pepper (pp. 173/4).

Our objective is not to impress on anybody’s mind that the reward for evil is evil, but to bring out the fact that a wicked leaders in the past have also caused unwarranted suffering for their subjects just the same way as did the colonial master.

On the other side of the molestation coin, Sillah unveils the sly employed by the colonial master to recruit Gambians as soldiers to go to Cameroon and Burma and fight wars that are not of their making in the name of defending Her Majesty the Queen of England and the British Empire. They (the colonial masters) use the prestige enjoyed by local leaders to get the maximum number of fighters they need by telling them that the war was for their own good; they promise the fighters heaven once the war ends. An unknown number of Gambians are to lose their lives in this war and those who are spared by the bullets and bombs return home only to be faced with the sad reality that they mean nothing to them or perhaps, their contribution is not appreciated. So in addition to making them spend another ten days off the shores of Bakau (as no proper arrangement is put in place by the colonial administration to receive them and give them a welcome befitting the heroes they believe they are), none of the promises of remuneration and elevation of status made to them by the colonial administration is fulfilled, and even the fulfillment of these promises is shrouded in uncertainty, going by the outpour of this grand-son of a war veteran:

And Britain has to bear all the costs of war! The veterans learnt also that the ruling party in Britain was not very sympathetic with the plight of the war veterans in her dependent territories but they had guarantees from the Secretary General of the Trades Union Congress that when the Labour Party wins the next elections, things would be put right. Grandfather died before the elections and grandmother sinking under his loss, grieved and pained and did not survive long after Grandfather’s death (p.187).

And on a similarly disheartening note, a war veteran recounts his ordeal with the colonial administration and how this war has not only blighted his hopes for a bright future, but has also heightened his domestic plight where he believes he is systematically gliding into the status of a scarecrow:

Since we came back a year ago in May 1946, I have been in and out of offices trying to get the money that we were promised would come to us after we destroyed the enemy. We were promised that we would live safer lives in freedom from fear and want. None of these has happened! I feel unsafe and insecure even in meeting my own wife and children. They have become cynical and I believe that they even laugh at me when I come back each day empty handed. You will not believe this but I think that they sing me the same song that bread and pastry seller sings. When I hear it I feel a void in the pit of stomach. “Baaba naata, baaba naata” (pp. 269).

In Dabbali Gi, Baaba Sillah explores in a clear succinct and detailed manner the theme of the struggle for independence. It is spearheaded by the few Gambian intelligentsia of the time under the leadership of Eddu Fara Bundaw, commonly known as Edward Francis Small. He fights on several fronts for this cause: on the political front as a representative of the Gambian people in parliament; and in the media as a journalist with the launching of The Gambia Outlook and of The Senegambia Reporter. Baaba Sillah broaches this theme in When the Monkey Talks (2003). In When the Monkey Talks, he reveals the contribution made by Francis Small and his cohorts in the struggle for the emancipation of the Blackman. Through concrete action, Small washes the dirty linens of the colonial administration in broad daylight in order to expedite the liberation of The Gambia from the shackles of colonialism and in this vein he will never cease an opportunity to harp on the contradictions of the colonial administration. The effects of the Second World War are more or less the national anthem of his papers. It is evident that Baaba Sillah has maximum reverence for Eddu Fara Bundaw whom he does not hesitate to parallel with other legendary figures like Marcus Garvey, Du Bois, George Padmore, Toussaint Louverture, etc.Chapters 22 and 24 are unarguably a fictional reproduction of Francis Small’s memoirs on colonialism and emancipation.

His electrifying speeches shiver and disturb the conscience of the colonial administration; and for this reason the system was left with no alternative but to silence and paralyze him. The deepening sentiment of jealousy in people like Thomas and Graham because of Francis’ growing popularity, whom they criticize as being too outspoken, Afrocentric, pedantic and whom they deride at the Uncle Jacob’s Wave Crest Bar as lecturer, as somebody who for no good reason seeks to bring about the down fall of the colonial regime, offer the colonial administration the window of opportunity they have been looking for to achieve their aim of bringing down Eddu Fara Bundaw to his knees.This practice was not peculiar to The Gambia alone. It was the surest weapon of the various colonial administrations in Africa. Not to go too far in search of an example, it was done in Sierra Leone to bring down Sir Isaac Theophilus Akuna Wallace Johnson to clip his political feathers and they succeeded.

The reader cannot but empathize with him when, in a letter addressed to Maurice Gomez, the then mayor of Rufisque, and Galandou Diouf, a member of parliament in Senegal, he laments about the difficulties he faces in the liberation struggle and especially his betrayal by his old comrades who have fallen prey to the tricks of the colonial master to form new movements based on religious conviction:

Often, colonizers whip up ethnic differences in order to divert attention from the colonial situation on their door steps. It is not intriguing therefore [that] those enlightened, forward-looking politicians, who can see the wood for the trees and evil from immorality of ethnic and religious politics and still use them as levers for their own selfish ends?(Chapter 24 page 250)

This is probably the appalling state of the colonies Chinua Achebe similarly laments about in his classic, Things Fall Apart when he says in the opening epitaph:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anachy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

This is terribly unfortunate! And we cannot agree with Achebe and Sillah more. Once people in the centre allow themselves to be put asunder, things will obviously fall apart and the master cannot but have his way in everything he wants to do.

We mentioned in the open pages of this paper that for a novel that we can easily put under the category of protest literature, nothing will be more appropriate than to see the author practice what he preaches. The novel abounds in vocabulary picked from some ethnic groups of The Gambia including Wollof, Aku, Mandinka and Fula. By so doing, he does not only anchor the work to its roots, but also attempts to domesticate the language of the Queen of England and the British Empire. We should however hasten to mention that he does not do so to satisfy a certain caprice; he does so in the right circumstances. That is, when he decides to introduce a word, phrase or sentence drawn from any of the local dialects, it means there is either no appropriate English equivalent for that word, phrase or sentence. What is the use of beginning a story with ‘once upon a time” in a Mandinka audience when there is “alli taling, taling” that is so natural to them?

In this single work, Sillah uses a series of narrative techniques ranging from songs, story telling (as part of the Mandinka folklore), the epistolary style (narrating in a letter form), the use of proverbs (to demonstrate indigenous African wit in speechcraft) to suspense. By so doing the author makes reading Dabbali Gi an easy pain, if it is a pain at all. Baaba Sillah’s literature is a Balzacian one. But what we believe makes reading this work very easy is the chapterization of the elements which the author resorts to help the reader have a solid grasp of the various issues he addresses in the work. Young readers should however be warned that the narrative is not linear or chronological and this might constitute a slight encumbrance in their reading. This is a deliberate writing style by the author using a postmodern approach.

In conclusion, I wish to affirm that Dabbali Gi is fully in keeping with the cannons of conventional literature that is to educate and entertain. By way of recapitulation, Dabbali Gi enables the reader to have a grasp of the socio-political history of The Gambia in a non-stilted and entertaining manner. Giving it a socio-political tag does not confine it to the interest of the political or social science students; every Gambian has everything to benefit from it no matter their social standing. The novel contains very important messages that will certainly guide us in our efforts to attain true nationhood: we must not allow outside forces to destroy our oneness as a people.

I wish to add that the book has the potential to create an international impact after the author would have tidied up the minor problems that are still denying it perfection. And we wish to add that we shall have no hesitation to recommend it for study in both senior secondary schools and university levels and even for it to be transformed into a movie as is the case with Alex Haley’s Roots.

I would like to end this paper with Eddu Fara Bundaw’s last words before retiring from politics:

I want to say emphatically that we do not have to adopt western solutions to Africa’s myriad of teething problems. Yes, we want to rule ourselves again and control our economies and politics – but within nationhood demands, sincerity, vision, plans and follow-up. We must find our own way in this world, or the world may leave us stranded at the shores with a sail-less boat, a map with no destination and scarcely any ideas about eking out an existence among man-eating beasts, killing fevers and the hazards of ignorance and superstition.(pp. 260)