On a sweltering July afternoon, when the sun pressed heavily against the earth and even the birds had gone quiet, Yerro straightened from the ridge of cassava he had been tending. Sweat streaked his temples. His back ached with the familiar weight of labor. But what seized him then was something deeper—an unfamiliar pain that spread through his chest like a slow fire.
It was not the pain of muscles or bones. It was the ache of reckoning.
He lifted his eyes toward the horizon where Jeshwang stretched outward in uneven lines of zinc roofs and newly carved paths. What had once been open land now bore the marks of hurry—houses squeezed too close, footpaths cutting through former fields, children playing where maize once stood. Jeshwang was no longer a village in waiting. It was becoming a town.
In the mid-1970s, The Gambia was changing in ways both visible and subtle. Banjul—still called Bathurst by many—had grown cramped under its own promise. Families pressed against one another on the narrow island. Civil servants, dockworkers, traders, and teachers spilled outward in search of air. Serrekunda swelled like a living organism. Jeshwang, once farmland and quiet homesteads, became a refuge for those fleeing congestion. With them came walls, disputes over boundaries, and the steady erosion of space.
Yerro felt it in the soil. Each season, the land yielded less. Each year, he walked farther to find room to plant. The earth was tired, overworked by too many hands on too little ground. He was a farmer by blood and by faith. To him, land was not property—it was breath. And here, the land was losing both.
He wiped his brow and sat on a stone, letting the wind dry his skin. The thought he had been circling for months finally took shape:
I must leave.
But to leave Jeshwang was not merely to move. It was to speak against the gift of a man who had shaped his destiny. Ousman Bah.
Yerro had not come to The Gambia with plans. He had arrived as a young man during the lean years in Fulladu, when drought ravaged cattle and fields alike. Hunger had thinned families and erased futures. In those days, Ousman Bah had already vanished from memory—spoken of in hushed tones, as one does the dead. He had left Fulladu long before Yerro was old enough to know his name.
So when Yerro, hustling in Banjul for anything to carry home, met a hospitable stranger who knew Buya Saaneh — his late mother — he thought fate was mocking him. Conversation unraveled lineage. Names aligned. Stories overlapped. And suddenly, the stranger became blood.
Ousman was not Ousman. He was Boukku Saaneh from Fulladu, the elder brother of his late mother, Buya Saaneh. He had converted to Islam upon arrival in The Gambia, and had changed his name.
From that moment, Yerro’s life bent toward stability. Ousman arranged his stay in The Gambia. He found him work. He supported him through illness. When Yerro needed surgery on his eye, Ousman insisted he stay. When Yerro returned to Fulladu, it was Ousman who prompted him to come back and settle in The Gambia with his family. Ousman Bah also brought Borogie and the children back, reuniting a scattered family. He did it without complaint, without ledger. He gave because kinship demanded it.
Jeshwang was Ousman’s land.
Jeshwang was Ousman’s generosity.
To ask to leave it felt like ingratitude.
Yet the truth remained: Jeshwang could no longer hold the life Yerro envisioned. He wanted animals again — poultry, goats, sheep, cattle. He wanted children who ran through fields, not alleyways. He wanted soil that answered effort. He wanted distance from the noise that was swallowing the earth.
He stood slowly, joints protesting.
I must speak to him, he thought.
Not in defiance. Not in rebellion.
In honesty.
Because a farmer who stays where the land has died is no longer farming—he is merely waiting.
And Yerro was not made for waiting.
…………………
Yerro did not go to Ousman Bah immediately.
In their world, such matters were not spoken in haste. A man did not carry news of separation on a restless tongue. He waited for the right air, the right silence, the right posture of the heart. Days passed. Yerro rehearsed his words while planting, while watering, while watching children trace new paths through what had once been furrows. Each rehearsal ended the same way—with his chest tightening and his mouth going dry.
Ousman Bah had given him everything that had made survival possible.
How did one say I must leave to the man who had said you may stay when the world had nowhere else to offer?
One evening, as the sun sank low and the compound softened into its familiar rhythms, Yerro noticed Ousman sitting alone beneath the neem tree. Gidelam had gone inside to prepare supper. The younger voices in the compound had thinned. It was the kind of hour when men spoke truth—not because it was easy, but because it could no longer be avoided.
Yerro approached slowly, removing his hat in respect.
“Uncle,” he said, lowering himself onto the mat a few paces away. “May your evening be gentle.”
Ousman looked up, his face easing into recognition. “You are welcome, my son. Sit. The day has been long.”
Yerro sat, folding his hands in his lap. For a moment, he said nothing. He watched the dust settle. He listened to the distant laughter of women and the clink of cooking pots.
Ousman studied him with the quiet attentiveness of an elder who sensed weight in silence.
“You have come with something in your chest,” he said softly. “Speak.”
Yerro swallowed. “Uncle… I have been thinking for many moons.”
Ousman nodded. “A man who thinks is already on a journey.”
Yerro lifted his eyes. “This land has been our blessing. You made it so. You carried me when I was nothing. You carried my family when I had no hands left to hold them.”
Ousman shifted slightly, uncomfortable with praise. “We are blood.”
“Yes,” Yerro said. “And blood remembers.”
His voice faltered, then steadied.
“But Jeshwang is changing. You see it too. The fields are shrinking. The soil is tired. Each season, I walk farther to plant. Each year, more walls rise where maize once stood.”
Ousman’s gaze followed the direction of Yerro’s eyes, toward the encroaching houses.
“Banjul is overflowing,” Yerro continued. “Serrekunda grows like a living thing. Jeshwang is becoming the place people run to when they can no longer breathe. Soon, there will be no land left to farm.”
Ousman remained silent.
“I am a farmer, Uncle,” Yerro said quietly. “It is not what I do. It is what I am. If I stay where the earth can no longer answer me, I will become a man who only pretends to live.”
The words trembled with honesty.
“I ask your permission to move,” he finished. “Somewhere with space. With soil. With room for animals. For children. Somewhere I can raise life, not just endure it.”
For a long moment, Ousman said nothing.
Inside him, something broke.
He had believed — perhaps foolishly — that after marrying Gidelam, after settling into a household that finally felt light, his life had reached its fullest form. He had one blood relative in this land. One nephew who carried his lineage. One family that anchored him to meaning.
Now that family was asking to leave.
It felt like abandonment, even though he knew it was not. It felt like loss, even though no one was dying.
“Is my house no longer enough?” he asked quietly.
Yerro bowed his head. “Your house has been more than enough. It has been my salvation.”
“Then why go?”
“Because salvation is not the same as fulfillment,” Yerro replied.
Ousman exhaled slowly. He understood then. He had always understood.
He was not a farmer. Even if he had tried, the land would not have spoken back to him the way it did to Yerro. He was a man of roads, of movement, of survival through trade and adaptability. Yerro was of soil and seasons. One could not become the other without losing himself.
“You are like your mother,” Ousman said softly. “Buya had the earth in her palms. She would have withered in a place without fields.”
Yerro’s eyes burned.
Ousman closed his eyes briefly.
To keep him here would be to cage him.
And Ousman Bah had once fled a cage himself.
“I will not stop you,” he said at last. “A man who knows where his breath is must follow it.”
Yerro’s shoulders sagged in relief.
“But know this,” Ousman added. “Your leaving will wound me.”
Yerro rose and knelt fully now, touching his forehead to the mat. “I do not go away from you. I go carrying you.”
Ousman placed a hand on his nephew’s shoulder.
“Then go well,” he said. “Plant where the land still listens. Raise your children where the sky is wide. Do not shrink your life to spare my heart.”
His voice trembled, just once.
“Because love that prevents growth becomes another form of hunger.”
And in that moment, two men understood each other fully — one letting go, the other learning how.
To be continued…
