By Dr Cherno Omar Barry
Book Title: Before the New Earth
Author: Tijan M Sallah
Publisher: Global Hands Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-9574073-8-1
Length: 16 short stories, 71 pages
Genre: Fiction / Political Allegory / Postcolonial Satire / Moral Tales
Notable Themes:
Postcolonial injustice and political corruption
Neocolonialism and foreign exploitation (especially Lebanese and Western presence in Africa)
Spirituality, tradition, and moral collapse
Identity, dignity, and cultural displacement
Women’s resistance and gender inequality
Satire of empire, religious hypocrisy, and classism
Yearning for social reform and a moral “New Earth”
Comparative Works:
The Man Died by Wole Soyinka – for its political resistance and critique of dictatorship
Xala by Ousmane Sembène – for its satire of bourgeois corruption and foreign control
Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – for its portrayal of betrayal and the decay of post-independence ideals
Sozaboy by Ken Saro-Wiwa – for its allegorical power and social protest through story
Let a New Earth Rise: Tijan M Sallah and the Moral Cartography of African Life
With Before the New Earth, Tijan M Sallah presents one of the most powerful and politically articulate short story collections in African literature. Originally published in 1988 and reissued in 2016 by Global Hands Publishing, this sixteen-story anthology revisits a literary landscape populated by overlooked heroes, unseen oppressions, and a people striving to reclaim their humanity. This collection signifies a notable shift in Gambian literature: it is among the first prose fiction works to depict Gambian everyday life with artistic seriousness while engaging with pan-African themes of power, corruption, colonialism, and social fragmentation.
Sallah—best known as The Gambia’s most internationally recognised poet and a World Bank economist—demonstrates in this collection that his gift for lyrical economy can easily extend from poetry to short stories. While Before the New Earth was his first volume of short fiction, the maturity and polish of its themes, structure, and voice show an author deeply aware of the moral role of literature in society. In a preface that reads like a manifesto, Sallah declares:
“These African stories, steeped firmly in the Gambian experience, attempt to fill this void. They are the moral tales of a society attempting to find and redefine itself; they retrieve the melodies of the past in order to create a new dance, a new earth.”
Thematic Unity and Literary Style
The book contains 16 short stories across 66 pages, concluding with a poetic piece titled On God and Children. Each story explores a different aspect of West African life—domestic, political, spiritual, or economic—but all share a common vision: the dream of a “New Earth,” a symbolic rebirth where justice, dignity, and community values flourish. This metaphorical earth serves both as a utopian ideal and a moral compass, a motif Sallah consistently weaves throughout his stories.
The language is lyrical yet accessible, often drawing on oral tradition, Islamic mysticism, and proverbs from Wolof and Mandinka cultures. His prose is rich with metaphor and allegory, as seen in titles like The Fate of Timbuktu or Dialogue of Flowers, which transcend realism to explore poetic symbolism.
A Journey Through the Stories
Instead of analysing each story separately, Sallah encourages the reader to view them as different expressions of the same longingfor dignity, truth, and renewal. Therefore, this review will explore the stories through a thematic lens, categorising them into interconnected moral and political narratives.
I. Postcolonial Reality and Injustice
In stories like Innocent Terror, The Arrest of Dumo, and Shit-Eaters, Sallah challenges the unjust legacies of colonial and post-independence governance. In Innocent Terror, a Lebanese youth casually shoots a Gambian cook, exposing the deeply rooted neo-colonial hierarchies and the blind spots of elite justice. The story echoes similar critiques seen in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Sembène Ousmane’s Xala, where wealth shields the guilty and distances the oppressed.
The younger Tambedou, the cook’s son, sues Fouad Aziz, the Lebanese boy, in a deeply flawed trial. The court scene satirises the performative impartiality of the legal system. Sallah writes:
“The judge returned and declared Fouad acquitted… praising Fouad for his conduct in the court… ‘orderly and well-mannered’ and ‘predisposed to exercise reasonable care.’”
This irony-laced verdict is a masterstroke of narrative restraint. The satire burns slowly, mimicking the way injustice burrows itself into ordinary life.
In The Arrest of Dumo, Sallah offers one of the most compelling portraits of political martyrdom in African fiction. Dumo, a principled citizen, is arrested without charge for “uttering the Word”—his vocal advocacy for democracy during the reign of “Jaama Jurei, the Great Peace.” Echoes of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka’s prison literature are palpable here, but Sallah’s treatment remains distinct: grounded in Gambian urban life, infused with music, and delivered with a quiet, almost folkloric grace. Dumo’s story ends not with martyrdom but with revolution—the masses rise, the Great Peace is overthrown, and a coup installs a new hope, though even this hope remains fragile.
In Shit-Eaters, the allegory is chilling: radioactive milk is dumped in Africa by Europe under the guise of aid. Sallah dramatises global inequality as a moral catastrophe.
“History’s darkest episodes haunt us. It visits us as Aid to the weak. Then it scolds us. Poisons us.”
Here, Sallah moves from Gambian-specific politics to a broader African indictment of post-colonial dependency and Western duplicity.
II. Migration, Displacement, and Urban Dreams
A second thematic cluster examines the disorientation of rural Gambians in urban settings—what Sallah renders as “the exile of trust.” In The Unfortunate Choice, Morr Demba, a villager from Saloum, travels to Banjul in search of work. Lured by dreams of success, he finds only misery, encountering relatives who have descended into begging. Like Obi in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, Morr Demba is trapped between tradition and the illusions of modernity. But Sallah offers his protagonist a small grace: the dignity of choosing an honest trade (fishing) despite its social stigma.
Similarly, The Mauritanian Ould Faal shows an outsider’s success amid local animosity. Ould Faal is thrifty, religious, and rich—yet resented. Sallah’s treatment is empathetic yet critical, painting a nuanced picture of the “naari ganarr” stereotype in Gambian society. His wife, veiled and unseen, is described in terms that reveal a voyeuristic society wrestling with notions of femininity and cultural superiority.
III. Women, Family, and Resistance|
Stories like Our House, Grandmother’s Voice, and Eros focus on familial dynamics and gender roles, often celebrating women’s quiet resistance.
Our House is one of the most charming and revolutionary stories in the book. Narrated by a young boy trying to enforce traditional gender roles, it quickly becomes clear that his sister Fama is the true hero—defiant, feminist, and fiercely independent.
“She was the tall woman, the giant palm tree that towered over the forest… She was determined. She pushed back against injustice.”
In Grandmother’s Voice, Jainaba, a hybrid child of Lebanese and Gambian descent, must reckon with her father’s betrayal and her brother’s suicide. Her grandmother’s voice becomes a moral anchor, a reminder that vengeance is never the answer:
“You cannot avenge death with death… the hen that loses one egg loses one too many.”
In Eros, the erotic is elevated to the level of sacred force. Desire becomes a site of cosmic unity, a metaphor for creation and freedom. Yet even here, Sallah is political. He reflects on American televangelists’ sexual scandals and contrasts them with the common man’s pure yearning for connection:
“Copulation has its own peace… Dirty, dirty, the Clean Mind said. But of course, there really are no clean minds.”
IV. Allegory, Satire, and Poetic Fables
Perhaps the most memorable literary achievements of the collection lie in its boldest experiments—stories that abandon realism for allegory, satire, and lyrical fable.
Dialogue of Flowers is a surreal exchange of letters between Queen Rose (the North) and Tireless Violet (the South), debating the meaning of justice, inequality, and the future. It is a beautiful, epistolary prose poem, where flowers take on the voice of the coloniser and the colonised. Tireless Violet cries out:
“You rape our pollens to cushion the enormity of your careless pleasures.”
Similarly, Weaverdom is an elaborate political satire using weaverbirds as colonial avatars. Their droppings fertilise the land but also dominate it, and they see themselves as natural rulers. Sallah’s mock-sermons parody the arrogance of imperial Britain:
“Our Father, exclusive to us the Chosen… to domesticate savages to be like us, but never, never equal to us.”
This Orwellian piece, reminiscent of Animal Farm and Ngũgĩ’s Devil on the Cross, is one of the finest political satires in Gambian fiction.
In The Fate of Timbuktu, Sallah’s pan-African sensibility shines. The story is both a eulogy and a call to arms. Timbuktu remains fragmented—its gold reduced to dust, its youth disillusioned. But the goldsmith believes:
“Through trying, the metalbits will coalesce. Timbuktu shall be rebuilt.”
Concluding Note: Toward a New Earth
Before the New Earth is not merely a collection of short stories. It is a political, moral, and literary treatise. It reads like the creative counterpart to Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and the poetic twin of Soyinka’s The Man Died.
Tijan Sallah’s collection ranks alongside other essential texts of post-independence African fiction. He captures the essence of a society caught between two worlds—its past rooted in dignity and its present tarnished by greed, silence, and betrayal. Yet he offers hope. Through struggle, satire, and spiritual resistance, the vision of a New Earth remains within reach.
As the opening epigraph from Margaret Walker declares:
“Let a New Earth rise / Let another world be born…”
Indeed, with these stories, Tijan M. Sallah ensures that it does.
Reviewer’s Note:
Before the New Earth deserves a place in every African literature syllabus. It is a classic of Gambian fiction, a mosaic of pain, hope, and rebirth. Sallah, in crafting these tales, has not only given The Gambia “an original voice” but has summoned Africa’s conscience to awaken—through fiction.
