An award-winning Gambian journalist, Mustapha K Darboe, has published an e-book on former dictator Yahya Jammeh and his 22-year system of rule.
A fiction titled ‘Playbook of a Tyrant’ is an e-book published on the biggest US-based online self-publishing retail site, Lulu.
“Rarely has one written a book to portray tyranny, a system established, sustained and ruined by the same fear that created it, as The Playbook of a Tyrant,” reviewer, Lamin Jahateh said.
With fictional scenes and characters, the book narrates how the disgruntled soldiers, led by a young man later to be known as Saikou Manneh, who staged a protest against the government were disarmed, detained but later set free.
This happens as the country’s president, Jakali Sanneh, was away.
Behind the country’s State House docked a military ship by Babylonia. Their mission was a joint military exercise with soldiers of Kanan (a fictional country representing The Gambia), so they claimed.
Except that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, President Sanneh, was not aware of this military exercise.
The book is a narration of how one of post-independent Africa’s earliest multi-party democracies was thrown into a dictatorship and suspicious international powers that might have backed the coup.
Darboe, a correspondent for Turkey News Agency and senior reporter at The Voice newspaper, has started journalism in 2014.
Two-time national journalism awards winner, Darboe’s interest areas are mainly politics and public policy.
