The Dreams of Katchikali: The Challenge of a Gambian National Literature

By Dr Tijan Sallah

            The question of a Gambian national literature, the search for a distinct narrative rooted in the sensibilities and rituals of a place, has been as illusive as the search for a Gambian national identity.   What does it mean to be a Gambian; to be part of a population of about one million; to be dependent on a groundnuts or peanut monocrop economy; to be geographically surrounded, except for the coastline, by Senegal; to be the confluence of some four major ethnic groups: Mandinka, Wolof/Serer, Fula/Tukolor,  and Jola; to be defined spiritually by the predominant import of the religion of Islam mixed into a sumptuous syncretism with the folk beliefs of an atavistic past ?  What is it that ties this peculiar constellation of factors into some common identity?  In a sense, the concept of Gambia is purely a colonial construct; what distinguishes it from its neighboring Senegal is fundamentally the experience of having been under a different colonial dispensation; more specifically the experience of surviving British Indirect Rule as opposed to French Assimilation cultural policy as was in Senegal.   So if the Gambians were today to cease speaking English or the Senegalese French and at the same time erase that anguished memory which is hidden in the manners, morals, habits of thought and institutions so permeated by colonial inhibitions, then we would be speaking of a Senegambian culture.  But this is an exercise in political fiction: the reality is that the Gambia is today an independent polity, has been evolving a distinct national culture, one so indelibly stamped with British superimposed sensibilities that to speak of Gambian culture involves speaking in the same universe as: cricket, Cable and Wireless, Beatles, the Twist dance, playing Monopoly  or Ludo game,Guiness, Vimto; Rothmans King Size, Piccadilly, and Benson & Hedges cigarettes; custard, Cow and Gate, Vermouth, Royal Victoria hospital,  Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, George Orwell,  stamps and currency with the pictures of  King George and Queen Elizabeth, imperial nursery rhymes, Empire Day, Rule Britannia Rule, and of course that prurient chant for imperial hegemony--God Save the Queen.

            To speak, therefore, of a Gambian national literature is to speak of that narrative which emerged with the colonial construction of a Gambian nation.  It cannot be a literature narrowly confined within an ethnic text or context, though it could draw from that rich repository of folk repertoires; but it must intrinsically be a literature which, by virtue of the fact that English has become the Gambia’s national lingua franca, must of necessity also be written in English.  When ethnic texts have not broken parochial boundaries to permeate the understanding of other ethnic groups in the Gambian nation, they cannot be called national literature.  Even Arabic, which is trans-ethnic in appeal in the Gambia, because it has been strictly limited to a religious milieu, has not risen to the status of the language of a national literature because Gambians who are animists or Christians do not subscribe to its use and are therefore excluded from its advantage.  I know I have advanced a controversial thesis that the definition of a national literature is one that uses a national language; in this sense ethnic texts could perhaps qualify if they get translated in the English lingua franca that all Gambians have the freedom and in some cases the opportunity to learn and use.[i]

            I have deliberately titled this essay, the dreams of “katchikali” to appeal to a shrine that is uniquely Gambian in character.  Katchikali is a shrine in the Kombo St. Mary’s Division with a pack of sacred crocodiles and attending priest, and nationals flock to it for prayer or for cure of various physical and spiritual ailments.  As far as I know, no equivalent of Katchikali exists in Senegal, except perhaps in Casamance where the Jola ethnic group maintain primordial African belief systems, un-sullied by the encroachment of Islam or Christianity.   Not suprising, therefore, that Gambian writer Lenrie Peters, that paterfamilias of a national Gambian literature in English, would have his second book of poems called Katchikali.   Was he directly conscious that he was forging a national literature? Was he aware that so much depends on the founding father of a national literature?   In Katchikali, Peter’s poem read,  “Can any good thing come/out of Gambia?/Wait./nay; go and see.”  The lines suggest an intriguingly interrogatory self-doubt but the answer, “go and see”, point to the fact that some good coming out of the Gambia may not only be in the realm of possibility,  but also probability.  I will twist the poem and ask, “Are Gambians capable of producing a national literature?”  Well, let us see below.

Lenrie Peters and the forging of national literature

I have argued in the Gambian Daily Observer of Friday October 8, 1993, as follows:

Our literature in English is still young.  Lenrie Peters is the pioneer.  His novel, The Second Round, and his books of poetry, Satellites and Katchikalli, are well known, spanning themes of homecoming and the anxieties and frustrations of a “been-to” returning to an independent Africa.  William Conton, Gambian who has spent most of his life in Sierra Leone is sometimes identified with Gambian literature because of his novel, The African. / These literary pioneers, however, suffered one major syndrome: cultural marginality.  By reason of upbringing, their interpretation of the Gambian universe is not significantly different from that of the African-American Alex Haley, author of Roots, or of the Afro-Caribbean Maryse Conde, author of Segu. The traditional sensibilities of the Senegalese Sembene Ousmane or the Nigerian Chinua Achebe eluded them.[ii]

            To understand the writings of Lenrie Peters, it is important to get a brief snapshot of his family background.  Lenrie Peters is quintessentially a Krio, which means he is a descendant of liberated Africans.[iii]  According to Akintola Wyse, the name Krio may have been derived from the Yoruba akiriyo, which means “those who go about from place to place after church.”[iv]  Perhaps this is a reference that Christianity is at the core of the Krio identity, for Europeans often used the Krio as a “buffer class” in between them and “native” Africans, and as conduits for the spread of Christian teachings and of Westernization in general.  The experience of being a Krio suggests that Lenrie Peters is an uprooted African.  As such, he does not write out of any distinct African indigenous tradition.  As Peters he himself once put it at the Berlin Horizon Conference on World Cultures, “My family has been detribalized for several generations.  I am like Alex Haley.  I am searching for my roots.”  The special experience of being a Krio, I would argue, has weaned Lenrie Peters away from tribal or nativistic allegiances and therefore made him into an avowedPan-Africanist.  We should note that the strongest advocates of Pan-Africanism have been not traditional Africans but Africans at the margin of African indigenous cultures; more specifically, the Afro-Caribbean, the African American and the Krio or liberated African.   The names that come to mind are: Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, W.E.B. DuBois, and Edward Wilmot Blyden.  In short, Africa as a totalizingconstruct is the comfortable niche foremost of Africans with a reconstructed identity.

            To be more specific about Lenrie Peters family background, he was born in Bathurst (now Banjul) on September 1, 1932, the son of Pa Lenrie Peters, Sr., an accountant at the export-import company S. Madi Ltd.,  and Auntie Keziah Peters, who came from a privileged family which boasted, among his brothers, the Maxwells, the first African graduates of Oxford University. Both parents emigrated to the Gambia from Sierra Leone. His hardworking father studied Greek and Latin at Fourah Bay College, and his mother was raised in England as a young girl in a Victorian family.  The couple were Anglicans, and they met in the Gambia where they married and became one of the “most respected families in the country.” Lenrie Peters’s father also edited the private weekly newspaper, The Gambia Echo, while working as an accountant, and it may not be entirely wrong to assume that his mother but especially his father may have provided the environment and impetus for Peters’s love of literature and writing.  Peter’s was a middle child, boasting two older sisters, Bijou (a nurse and journalist); Florence Mahoney (distinguished historian), and two younger sisters, Miss Ruby (retired UN administrator) and Alaba (now diseased, but a figure in film and big business).  Peter’s early education was at St. Mary’s Primary School and the Methodist Boys’ High School in the Gambia. Because of the inadequacy of the science curriculum at the Methodist Boys’ High, Peters was sent for a two year science study at Prince of Wales High School in Freetown, Sierra, where he received his Higher School Certificate and from where, upon return to Gambia, he left for Cambridge Technical College in England, where he studied Latin and Physics.  He proceeded, between 1953-56 to study Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, becoming President of the African Students’ Union, after which he studied medicine at the University College Hospital, London.  In Cambridge, he began writing poetry and plays, became a Pan-Africanist, and started The Second Round, which got first published in 1965 under the Heinemann African Writers Series.  While pursuing his versatile interests-- the scientist and the renaissance man-- Peters pursued broadcasting with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Africa Service and later moved to the World Service.  In 1969, Peters returned home and, in 1972, after two years of government service at the Bansang Hospital, he went into a private partnership with Dr. Samuel J. Palmer, starting the first private Clinic in the Gambia, the Westfield Clinic, located in Kanifing.[v]

            In a sense Lenrie Peters’s own peculiar personal biography informs his own writings.  His novel, The Second Round, is many ways autobiographical, depicting as protagonist a certain Dr. Kawa, who returns to Sierra Leone after studies in England but finds himself alienated from life in Freetown because of the uneasy mixture of  traditional African living and the demands and time consciousness of  the modern world he left behind in England.  To borrow a metaphor from Nigerian poet Gabriel Okara, life in Freetown was, in short, filled with the existential tensions characteristic of listening to the “piano and the drum.”   The return of the “been-to” is made all the more frustrating by societal expectations:  Dr. Kawa’s mother is happy to see her son back and thanked the “English for giving her son knowledge and sophistication”  but “lamented their neglect of his stomach.”[vi]  So, like all good African mothers, she made prime business of  the task of feeding his prodigal son well, compensating retroactively for his years of food deprivation as a student in England.  Dr. Kawas’ mother and friends expect him to get married, settle down and acquire property but Kawa’s reluctance and restlessness eventually lands him into a betrayed friendship with Laura and into the unhappy lives of Marshall and his wife, Clara.  Eventually, Dr. Kawa leaves Freetown to search for an illusory contentment in some lonely provincial hospital.  This novel is essentially author life-reflexive; it very much mirrors aspects of Peters’s own life.

            But autobiography worked into fiction does not necessarily make for bad literature.   There are beautiful poetic lines in The Second Round and the book often echoes with moments of philosophizing about the condition of the black man.  This often gives one of the feeling of a writer who is overly self-conscious and who has a Pan-African cause, but it is a cause uninformed by a local traditional consciousness.  In fact, the immediacy of the effects of the social realism is often filtered through the sieve of alienation, through the mental framework of an  alienated African-- or should I not say alienated Gambian,  a  Gambian not alienated from the physical reality of Gambia but from its centuries-tested  traditional psychology, from its intergenerational transmitted oratures.   Consider these lines from Dr. Kawa responding to his mother, Mrs. Kawa, using his English trained wisdom:

But we mustn’t spend the next century moaning about what they have done and what they have not done for us.  Perhaps it’s just as well they haven’t done too much.  At least we shall have less to undo before we restart.  We must get on with tackling with the vital problems of Africa without making martyrs of ourselves.  It’s becoming a neurosis.  I believe in Africa and I believe in the black man because he still has warmth left in him-- the same warmth you and I borrow from the sun and transmit to the earth.  He still has a smell so that when you go into his house you know a human being has been there.  It is a kind of identity.[vii]

As much as the lines appear dismissive of whining against colonialism and celebrates self-responsibility in  blackness and Africanity, it conveys some self-defeatist aspects; for what self-apprehending  African would take the smell in his house as a kind of identity? Or am I taking this biological imagery literally?  Or was Peters simply carried away by the excesses of his pen?  Of course, a tradition-conscious African has better sources for an identity.  Also, is the African really any warmer than the European, is he intrinsically any different, except that he has been shaped by different historical and environmental factors?  I do not believe so, but I know some advocates of Negritude believe in some intrinsic difference.

                          Even the story that Peter’s develops in the latter chapters of the novel equating the passive, vulnerable character of sea turtles to the situation of black Africans does not borrow much from African oral traditions; it appears artificial, contrived, although lavishly rich with his poetic skills and his knowledge of biology as a remarkably well-trained surgeon.  When Peters notes the situation of sea-turtles as the “dismal spectacle of a harmless creature worn out by the demands of survival and he, Man, had inflicted great suffering on her;” is he drawing a parallel with the condition of  black Africans?   Peters’s asks some profound philosophical questions, “But what has death to do with suffering?  Both are natural laws-- indisputable.”  But in that realm of nature, there is “no need for powerful muscles and large hearts.”  What one needs is a “tiny speck of brain and a weapon” and the possibilities are in one’s hand to “subjugate the whole world.”[viii]

                       I have delved in some brief detail into The Second Round because it is one of the first, if not the first novel written by a Gambian though it can hardly be called a great model for a national literature from a tradition-conscious point of view.  It has great writing in it, but great writing alone does not make for a great national novel.  I have argued elsewhere that “in so far that the literary works of Gambians reflect the values, attitudes and beliefs of our society, the ideas and images we live by in our “shared house”, there is a Gambian literature.”[ix]  Does The Second Round meet that test?  The Gambian reading public is to judge.

                        I wish to argue that the start of a Gambian national literature started with Lenrie Peters book of poems, Katchikali.    Although in his first book of poems, Satellites, Peters meanders and philosophizes about all aspects of the African and human condition, but except for a few poems about homecoming and personal loss, there is hardly anything in the earlier works to merit being called Gambian literature.  Of course, there is that beautiful poem of homecoming titled, “We have Come Home”, which deals with the hopes and anxieties of the “been to” set against the natural landscape of the Gambia:

We have come home

from the bloodless wars

With sunken hearts

Our boots full of pride

From the true massacre of the soul

When we have asked

`What does it cost

To be loved and left alone[x]

The student’s return after being triumphant with his studies, the “bloodless wars,” is marked by the uncertainties at home and the aspect that “the spinning coin” or  “luck” plays in people’s final destinies:

We have come home

When the dawn falters

Singing songs of other lands

The death march

Violating our ears

Knowing all our love and tears

Determined by the spinning coin.

We have come home

To the green foothills

To drink from the cup

Of warm and mellow bird song

To the hot beaches

Where boats go out to sea

Threshing the ocean’s harvest

And the hovering, plunging

Gliding gulls shower kisses on the waves.[xi]

                  In much of Peter’s poetry, there is a serious groping for self which manifests itself in the exploration of images from different traditions--African, European, American, and Asian-- and this self-search is sometimes intellectual, sometimes political, but always sincere.  The poet’s sophisticated musings bristle with names such as “Kafka,” “Sunjiatta”, “Samori,” and “Socrates.”  But they remain at that level-- intellectual musings; the poet is rarely involved in these characters, either through a mastery of the related traditions or through strong instinctual identification.  The poet remains largely cool-headed, aloof, almost like a scientist poet-- lacking that passionate involvement which makes poetry more than just the product of intellectual labor but also of social commitment and involvement.  Compared to another Senegambian poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor, there is a remarkable difference.  Although both draw from the same general set of traditions or at least surrounded by them, Senghor, as a poet, deeply rooted in Serer traditions and their gift of powers over the waters, shows more of a poetry of passionate involvement.  But this is not to say that Peters is a better or worse poet, rather this is to say that poets are products of a cultural and historical experience, and Peters, though sometimes not too satisfying to the local Gambian in his work, nevertheless remains sincere to his background.

                  But, except for the poem, “We have Come Home,” it is really in Kachikali, that Lenrie Peters, the founding father, can be said to have returned home and started the forging of a national literature.  In one of the poems in Katchikali, Peters uses rhythms of incantation to celebrate the Gambia river:

A slender river flows

three hundred miles to harbor;

wide-mouthed towards the sun,

down inguinal pursuit

of open sea; tomorrow

fenced by mangroves,

settlements, ancient traditions,

The Gambia flows;

a trusting limb of elegance.[xii]

                  In a sense, Lenrie Peters imagination is trapped within the traditions of European poetry but in these lines and in many lines in Katchikali, he remains faithful to African (and for that matter Gambian) themes and images.  As Chinua Achebe in his novel, Anthills of the Savannah, refers humorously (or perhaps sarcastically) to Senghor as a “Manding-Gaul;” Lenrie Peters could also be referred to in Nathan Hare’s terminology as an “Afro-Saxon.”  But Peters is an Afro-Saxon with a difference; he has pioneered our national literature.  In the poem “Katchikali,”Peters takes us to the shrine that is truly Gambian:

And the crocodiles

of another world

under your waters

tame as pumpkins

Katchikali

Katchikali, Katchikali

the women weight-drowned

towards the farms bend

their knees and say a prayer

Katchikali[xiii]

And the respect the poet feels for this shrine of sacred crocodiles comes when he challenges Gambian’s own neglect of their traditional heritage:

and men strong as Baobabs

press-ganged to clear your

dense embraces

the sweat of fear on their faces

plead with every fateful stroke

`It is not I who destroys you

it is not I Katchikali

but those who ignore your mysteries.[xiv]

At the end of the poem, the poet mourns the commercialization and defilement of the shrine, what the poet calls, “seething self-interest and corruption and the demon of gain in your waters Katchikali.”[xv]

                  I have argued implicitly above that Lenrie Peters is the founding father of our national literature, and that it is in his book of poems, Katchikali, that he truly returns home and starts the project of a national literature.  However, I have also argued that the cultural marginalization that Peters feels as a Krio has often made him preoccupied with the larger issues of the continent than with the specific indigenous traditions of the Gambia.  I have argued that our founding father writes out of the tradition of English poetry, partly a reflection of his education and partly a reflection of his personal background as an “Afro-saxon.”  I have argued that our founding father is a great poet and novelist in terms of style, but the substance of his work often leaves a taste of a person in search of himself than one rooted in a bedrock, indigenous Gambian tradition.  I have argued that it is perhaps this cultural marginalization which makes Peters into a Pan-Africanist, attacking the injustices of history, conscious that his loss of his roots came about through Europe’s project of African colonization and enslavement.  We move to the new generation of writers.

The Second Generation of Gambian Writers

                  With the launching of a national literary tradition, there was a need for continuity in contribution and deepening.  Since his return to the Gambia in 1971, Lenrie Peters has been a catalyst for creative writing in the country, encouraging young writers and serving as founding editor of Ndanaan, the short-lived literary magazine published by the Gambian Writers Club between September 1971 to September 1976.    I myself have benefited in the early 1970s from his selfless encouragement and sacrifice in sparing his busy time as a medical doctor and seeing me in a spare room in the Westfield Clinic, reviewing my poetry and offering suggestions for improvement.  The Welsh critic, Prof. Stewart Brown, also acknowledges this catalytic role of Peters and also notes about Ndanaan and the emergence of a national literature:

There were only five issues of Ndanaan, published intermittently over the five year period of its existence, and although occasional stories by Gambian writers appeared in other journals like West Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s, more than twenty years elapsed between the publication of Peters’ novel, The Second Round, and the next significant work of prose fiction to be published by a Gambian author, Ebou Dibba’s fine historical novel Chaff on the Wind, published in 1986.  Since then, however, Dibba has published a second novel, Fafa (1989), and two young Gambians have published interesting collections of short stories: Nana Humasi (or Nana Grey-Johnson)’s A Krio Engagement (1987) and Tijan M. Sallah’s Before the New Earth (1988). Sheriff Sarr’s Meet Me in Conakry (1984), a work of popular fiction targeted at young adults but more widely read, has gone into its fifth edition in four years, and several Gambians have published poetry in international journals and anthologies.[xvi]

Stewart Brown is not very complimentary of the works published in Ndanaan, as he stated, “There is, in truth, no much that is intrinsically interesting in the material published in the journal (Ndanaan), except-- in terms of the argument of this essay-- that the themes touched by several of the writers reflect a growing awareness of-- and concern--for the history and particular political situation of The Gambia.  Most pertinent is Gabriel J. Roberts’ play “A coup is Planned’ in Vol. 2., no. 1. of March 1972 which worries the issues of the power relationship between The Gambia and Senegal.”[xvii]  But should one denigrate a beginning, even if it may have been a false start; I would argue no.  There was some merit to Ndanaan in that it provided a forum for any one that had creativity in English to come out.  The result is that many amateur writers like: Swaebou Conarteh, Hassan Jagne, and Charles Jow first saw the light of day through Ndanaan.   The Wolof have a saying that, “Ki hep joodom wanyi dara jam” (he who belittles his origins diminishes his dignity); therefore,  we must respect Ndanaan as a literary event, if no other reason than it was a beginning.

                  But Ndanaan was not the only literary outlet for an emerging national literature, in the 1970s Bemba Tambedou also started a program over Radio Gambia titled, “Writers of the Gambia” to encourage amateur young writers.  I personally got my first national exposure through this.  In a very real sense, a national literature requires four important elements: a national language, a coterie of producers (writers), a constellation of intermediaries (publishers, magazines, book distributors, libraries, critics) and a critical mass of consumers (a reading public).  Among these elements must also emerge a culture of rewarding good literature.

                  If one looks at factors which impede the development of a Gambian national literature, the biggest impediments have been the lack of a critical mass of readers with purchasing power and the lack of publishing and critic industry.  Much of the book publishing in the Gambia used to be done by the Government Printer and then followed the Gambia Book Production and Material Resources Unit.  Some of the luckier writers published internationally with Heinemann, Macmillan, or Three Continents Press.  But, on the whole, most budding writers have problems finding publishing outlets for their works.  As for book distributors, the scene is dismal.  There are only two competent bookstores: Methodist bookshop on Buckle Street, Banjul, and Chaaka’s Bookshop on Clarkson Street; as well as a few bookshops inside high schools stocking curricula material and not available to the larger public. In terms of libraries, there is the National Library and the British Council Library, and the various high schools also maintain slim collections.  On the reading side, the reading public is usually confined to the high schooled populace or high school students who have particular texts as required reading in their curricula or syllabi.  This is a sad commentary, but a national literary culture cannot thrive only if reading is done only if it is enforced.  Writers need to write literature that is relevant and literacy needs to be democratized so that the pursuit of the mind is made into an intrinsic good of  itself.  Democratization of literacy, of course, requires a seriously committed government, which has been lacking in the Gambia.

                  Dr. Jabez Ayo Langley, former head of the Gambia civil service and a renowned expert on Pan-Africanism, mockingly told me of government’s lack of interest in literacy and literature as exemplified in the usually mindless content of the Gambia News Bulletin, the official organ of the government.  He notes that the public enthusiasm for the paper is shown in the fact that they use it to wrap “gerte saaf” (roasted peanuts) or “nyambeeh nyebeh and diwteer” (cassava and palm oil), or sometimes even use it as toilet paper before they wash their hands with kamalik soap.  I note this to be part of what I have always noted as the Foni syndrome, a tendency for retrogressive governments to keep their populations illiterate, hungry and pregnant and to breed weaknesses in their citizenry so that they can continue their retrogressive rule.

                  But our national direction need not be this way.  In fact, the Gambia has been developing a serious and able group of creative writers and similar group of critical scholars.  For the latter, I would mention the Gambian Professor Mbye Cham (who is a leading authority on African Film and writes more on Senegalese film and fiction), Dr. Siga Jagne, who is the first professional Gambian critic to take seriously Mariama Ba and Tijan M. Sallah’s works, and the Nigerian (?) Prof. Pamela Olubumiyi Smith, who writes about the fictional works of Ebou Dibba, and the Jewish American scholar-critic, Professor Samuel Garren and Nigerian critic Prof. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, who have critically written about Sallah’s works and the Welsh Professor Stewart Brown, who has been the most ardent champion-critic of an emergent Gambian national literature.

                  Among the new generation forging a Gambian national literature are: Ebou Dibba (who has published 3 novels, Chaff in the Wind,1986; Fafa, 1989, and Alhaji-- the last which is a novel for young adults); Tijan M. Sallah (who has published 8 books-- 3 books of poetry When Africa Was A Young Woman, 1980; Kora Land, 1989; Dreams of Dusty Roads, 1993; 1 book of short stories, Before the New Earth,1988; as well as two anthologies, New Poets of West Africa, 1995, and The New African Poetry-- An Anthology, 1999; and an ethnography, Wolof,1996); Nana Grey-Johnson (who has published a book of short stories, A Krio Engagement, 1987, and most recently published two novels, The Magic Calabash, 1998 and I of Ebony, 1999, and another collection of short stories, Children of the Spyglass, 1996); Sheriff Sarr (who has published a juvenile travelogue, Meet Me in Conakry,1984), and Gabriel J. Roberts (who published a collection of plays broadcast over BBC, Nine Plays for Radio, 1973).  There are other amateur writers such as Swaebou Conarteh (who has published two chapbooks of poetry, Great Wrinkles Up the Sky’s Sleeve and Blind Destiny, 1981); Bala S.K. Saho (who has published a mini-novel titled, The Road to My  Village, 1994);  Sally Singhateh, (who has published a  short novel for young readers titled, Christie’s Crisis, 1998)and Modu F. Singhateh (who has published a collection of stories titled A Day in Their Lives, 1984).  These writers include most of the major ethnic groups of the Gambia.  Ebou Dibba’s father is Mandinka and his mother is Wolof; Tijan M. Sallah’s father is Tukolor and his mother is Serer/Wolof; Nana Grey-Johnson’s father is Krio and his mother is Wolof; Sheriff Sarr’s father is Serer and his mother is Wolof, and Swaebou Conarteh, Bala Saho, Sally Singhateh and Modu Singhateh have both parents as Mandinka.  The Gambia has yet to produce a writer who writes out of the Jola tradition.

                  Overall, it is refreshing to see the multi-ethnic identity of most of these writers, perhaps a fusion encouraged by the predominant and trans-ethnic culture of Islam which emphasizes the faith rather than the ethnicity, unless the two become coincidental.  Many of the writers, being products of inter-ethnic marriages, point to the forging of a common Gambian culture-- not based on ethnic entrenchment or ethno-nativist strategies of dominance-- but on unifying what is valuable from each ethnic group, emphasizing cultural unity.  My friend and compatriot, Prof. Sulayman Nyang, speaks of the “Wol-Mande-Fulbeh” civilization, referring to the cultural affinities and unity of the Wolof, Mandinka and Fula civilizations;  I would stretch this integrative paradigm to include the many “acephalous” and numerically minor ethnic groups of the Senegambia area, which include the Jola, Conyagi, Baynunka, Mandiago, Pelpel, etc, which I will subsume, though inaccurately, under the rubric of “Jola.”   This way, I will modify Nyang’s paradigm for our subregion as the “Wol-Mande-Fulbeh-Jol” civilization, a more inclusive and accurate representation.

                 Among the new generation of writers, Ebou Dibba’s Chaff on the Wind can be described as the Gambia’s truly first national novel.  Unlike Peters, Dibba writers out of England in voluntary self-exile.  Chaff on the Wind is set in the Gambia of the 1930s, just before the Second World War.  It details the story of two young men--  Dinding, a teenage Mandinka boy from a strict Muslim family, from upriver (provinces) who came to the colonial capital, Bathurst, to search for his fortunes.  The other young man is Pateh, of Fula and Cheddo (pagan) origin, who also left rural areas for the capital in search of opportunity.   Dinding, in particular, is drawn away from the life that his family has hoped for.  Both young men got involved with a trader in highly profitable smuggling. Dinding, the sober and diligent Muslim, turns into a prosperous merchant smuggling goods into Senegal against war-time regulations, and  Pateh, the wild hedonistic pagan, get entangled with him such that their two fates and tied destinies become “chaff on the wind” of circumstances.  Chaff on the Wind is brilliant in the way it details village and urban life, the attitudes of various ethnic groups, and individual struggles with destiny.

                  Take the following passage from Chaff in the Wind which develops Dinding’s interaction with Njartigeh (literally meaning in Wolof, the hospitable host)  and the transformation of Dinding from a naive provincial boy into what the novelist Dibba describes as “a young man with authority stamped on him:”

            “The marabou has asked me to tell you that if you want the special prayer he reserves only for those able to afford it, the Listiharr, then he will require some money.”

            “Why should he want a Listiharr when he has nothing to show for several months here?  Dinding asked sharply.

            “I know how you feel.  But the Listiharr is something special.”

            “Yes, at a special price too, I bet.”

            If anybody had told Njartigeth that such hardness could be instilled in anybody in such a short time, he would not have believed it.  There was no doubt, it was going to be difficult to pull a fast one over the young man.

            “But do you know what is involved in the Listiharr?”

            “No, but I know you’ll tell me.”

            “The marabou has to live in isolation for a few days to be in a state of purity, purity of mind, and purity of spirit.  That means he has to eat special food, mainly meat, so you see, that costs.”

            “Njartigeh, enough is enough.  What guarantee is there that this Listiharr will work any better than what he has already done?”

            “One does not lay odds on requests to God.”[xviii] 

This exchange, one of the most poignant in the novel, questions the mystification which pervades in the synchretic (Islam mixed with folk beliefs) culture of the Gambia.  Ebou Dibba, the novelist, appears to be poking fun at the commercial and exploitative nature of Islam in the Gambia, the seemingly empty promises of faith healing;  but he himself, unwittingly, becomes the victim of a materialist interpretation of a mystical relationship.  Do we really understand the spiritual powers of marabous or should we just rule them all out as just fake?  How do we explain similar behavior on the part of American presidents and their wives (e.g., recall Ronald and Nancy Reagan who often sought advice from a psychic/astrologer, Nancy Quigley!).  Is it totally unreasonable when heads of states  consult and get executive council from spiritual figures, psychics, shamanists or palm readers?  Recall the cases of Ghana’s first premier, Kwame Nkrumah and Yugoslavia’s leader, Marshall Tito, who were alleged to follow the spiritual advice of a Senegalese Marabou, Cheikh Ibrahima Niasse (or Barham) of Kaolack, Senegal; recall also the cases of many French Presidents with African Marabous!

                  In the genre of poetry and, at the risk of  being accused of being self-indulgent, my own poetic works have sought to forge a modern national poetic tradition.  In my book of poems,Kora Land, I have sought to capture the Gambian landscape, its flora and fauna, and its traditional sensibilities into collective celebrations of place and memory.  Take the poem, “Banjul Afternoon,” which opens:

            The afternoon was hot.

            The river-breeze enveloped the city.

            We walked along Independence Drive,

            Staring at the Royal Victoria Hospital,

            And then the Texaco gas station.[xix]

Later the poem continues:

            At McCarthy Square, facing the

            Imposing monuments, the clock tower,

            And the Quadrangle, the smell

            Of sweaty shoes arrested us.

The smell of sweaty shoes known in Wolof as  “kamambay” is a much derided (but also talked about) smell in Gambian folklore.  The poem continues to celebrate the images of that colonial capital with these lines:

            Wolof women passed us,

            Dignified as ostrich,

            Chewing sticks in their mouths.

            Handbags strapped around their arms.

            They spat at every corner,

            Trading happiness for hygiene [xx]

                  In a sense, the second generation of writers of the Gambia are forging a remarkably valuable tradition.  They are pursuing meanings and ways to celebrate or artistically dissect place, memory and hope but, in doing so, they do not mind being irreverent.  There is a sense in which their works make us confront the human condition in the Gambia in a way that has never been explored before: whether in Ebou Dibba’s existential exploration of rural youth on escapades in the city as mere Chaff in the Wind, or in Tijan Sallah’s celebration of place in Kora Land, or in Nana Grey-Johnson’s exploration of realistic lives in poignant narratives in A Krio Engagement.  There is a mainstay that is distinctively Gambian in these works and that shows great promise in laying the foundation for a grand architecture that is the forging of a national literature and consciousness.

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[i] I know the language question is complex.  We, of course, need to promote the development of African languages for both creative expression and problem solving; otherwise they risk being demoted to junior partners in our communication tool-box or even being made to atrophy.  We need to encourage the growth of African languages because they are our children’s first language, their natural language, and through it we can circumvent the inhibitions in using a foreign tongue and enable the easy assimilation of  modern artistic and scientific habits of thought.  I am, however, not naive to believe that all African languages need to be heavily invested in; some languages are just not economically and socially viable.  For a language to survive, it needs to have a sufficient critical mass of users (speakers and writers).  Also, using an African language often involves uneasy or unpleasant political bargaining within a given African polity; whose African language do you use?  The language of the majority or of the plurality or of the powerful (economically or politically) or of some combination of the three?  Whose ethnic language would you promote as the national language?  It is for this reason, I side with Chinua Achebe.  Africans should write in what ever language they are comfortable with.  And where colonial languages have served us well as unifying lingua franca; I do not have any inhibitions on why they should not serve as a national language as long as they are employed in the service of an African sensibility.  In regions like East Africa, where an African language, Swahili, has served that constructive unfiying role; well, all the more for the better.

[ii] Sallah, Tijan M., “Words or Rice?  The State of Literature in The Gambia,” Daily Observer, Friday, October 8, 1993, p.7.

[iii] I recognize I have made so much of Lenrie Peters’s Krio background but there seems to be no other way of understanding his writings.  I also recognize that not all Krio’s are alike and cannot be pigeon-holed into one controversial category called “liberated Africans.”  Krios vary in their degree of consciousness and identification with traditional African culture. Some Krios were part of the black poor in London who immigrated to Freetown, Sierra Leone; some were freed African slaves from Nova Scotia, Canada; some were runaway slaves or cimarons or maroons, many of whom were Koromantee from the Gold Coast, and some were liberated Africans, mostly Yoruba, and a good number of them were Moslems, and are known as Moslem Krios or Aku Marabouts.

[iv] Wyse, Akintola, The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History, Washington, D.C., Howard University Press, 1991, p.6.

[v] Arko, Kwame, “Protean thou shalt be-- Profile,” West Africa, 23 December-5 January 1997, p. 2018.

[vi] Peters, Lenrie, The Second Round, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1965, p. 19.

[vii]  Ibid., p.23

[viii] Ibid., p. 111.

[ix] Sallah, op.cit., p. 7.

[x] Peters, Lenrie, Selected Poetry, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981, p. 22.

[xi] Ibid., p. 23.

[xii] Ibid., p. 46.

[xiii] Ibid., p. 74.

[xiv] Ibid., p. 75.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Brown, Stewart, “Gambian Fictions,” Wasafiri, Spring 1992, No. 15, p. 4.

[xvii] Ibid., p. 4.

[xviii] Dibba, Ebou, Chaff on the Wind, London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1986, pp. 159-160.

[xix] Sallah, Tijan M., Kora Land, Washington, D.C., Three Continents Press, 1989, p. 23.

[xx] Ibid.

We will comment on this excellent piece of presentation in due course! Cherno O. Barry