I haven’t done a Gibramble article since Cometh The God, which was published in the last edition of 2023 and seemed to have frightened readers. It feels like a lifetime ago. This year has been great in so many ways, and terrible in so many other ways too. Let me shuttle between talking about what everyone is talking about and talking about what no one is talking about.
I wanted to start with Nawec but it is dying a miserable death and we are living an even more miserable life; the interesting surge in gerontophiles in our generation; PAB’s death joke about ANM; the fetid political gargoyles chewing and spitting out flesh; the countdown to World War 3; King Colley’s Gambian cockroaches; the Donald Trump epic comeback or Baltasar. Instead, I will pick just two subjects; UNGA79 protest in New York and Moses vs Moses in Banjul.
It was a hot evening. I tried to get some updates from PAB’s UNGA activities. I had already had enough of Gambians’ obsession with Diomaye’s speech. Someone even said Diomaye did not look at the speech before him unlike Barrow. Yeah, right. In my futile scouring of the internet for content, I came across two video clips in which a few diaspora members ganged up on Dr Ismaila Ceesay and Dr Ahmadou Lamin Samateh in the streets of New York. Both gentlemen were admirable calm in a tense situation, refusing all temptations to do a 2013 Tangara. I watched the Dr Samateh clip at least ten times and each time, I got even more upset. Protest is normal in democracies but that wasn’t a protest; it was abuse and bullying. Even if I were a president (not even a minister), and a chronic idiot follows me around insulting me in the name of protest, I’d punch their teeth into their throat. The guy couldn’t even pronounce “dictator” and I am pretty sure he doesn’t know the meaning either, otherwise he wouldn’t be tailing a state minister calling him a dictator. He is a bully. He had no right—even though he thinks he has in a free world—to break Dr Samateh’s spirits just so he could feel good about his own despondent life. I stumbled on a survey that puts The Gambia on 5th in ten African countries with the lowest IQ levels. I was upset at the author but that Dr Samateh incident made me realise the author was even generous with our IQ ranking. We are actually 10th and the only reason we are 10th is because there’s no 11th.
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I guess you’ve all been seeing the Moses vs Moses saga play out in public. I mean UDP’s former Moses President Barrow and The Voice’s Musa Sheriff. You can include Muhammed in the mix too, not Jah, Darboe. I mean, Momodou. The Voice quoted an anonymous source in the National Peoples Party which said the president has chosen a successor. The same political party denied this claim but the police arrested the journalists and charged them with false publication. Who says it’s false? NPP? The police believe politicians more than journalists? Besides, if the police ever take this case to court, how will they establish that it’s false? By lining up the anonymous source as a witness? This is one of those cases that have no life at all. The police only heard the president saying he’s going to court, then they jumped in to save the day. Their services aren’t needed in this. This is between two big boys, Adama and Musa. Let them settle it as big boys do. And they did.
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I loved my job. I looked forward to waking up every morning. First as an intern in 2012, I would walk on foot from Bundung to Kairaba Avenue. I wouldn’t care that I didn’t wait for breakfast at home and remain hungry for the rest of the day. I had dreams so big they kept me awake at night. They were not nightmares but scary, and like Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said, if your dreams do not scare you, then they are not big enough. I would add: then you have no business dreaming. Print journalism perfectly aligned with my passion for writing. It was a platform to develop consistently and I did, so much that no other aspect of journalism made sense to me. I could see myself growing into a good writer in a decade; write and publish poems, books and articles. Not everything went as planned, though. So far, I have resisted the temptation to write a book. The suggestions never cease. I have missed out a lot on school but those times were judiciously spent on understanding this weird creature called Gambian. You will be pestered to write a book but it will gather dust at Timbooktoo without anyone buying it. In fact, you will be expected to give them a free signed copy. If I ever write a book in the next years, it will definitely be about China; at least there is an established reading culture there and if only a quarter of the 1.4 billion people buy the book, I’d gloatingly waive poverty a goodbye. I also have received tons of suggestions in the past decade to create my own media platform, even if it’s just a blog. But I know, deep down to my bones, that they will be the first to boycott it and try to get it suspended once my views suddenly run contrary to their group-views. Like I always say, if you’re in a situation where your survival depends on Gambians, then you’re as good as dead. And once you’re dead, the same people would spend a fortune on your funeral when much less could have been spent to keep you alive. The solution is to mould yourself into a thick-skinned soteriophobe.
I am quitting my job without any new offer. In fact, lots of people now think they may have overrated my intelligence while others think I’ve been bitten by the fatal backway bug. Fatal as in, it’s the boat that kills not the bug. Both assumptions aren’t so far from the truth. The actual truth is I am quitting because my job has drained me. Each time I sneak back home dead in the night, while everyone is asleep, I don’t want to wake up. I just want to continue sleeping and if I ever wake up, I quit. But, for nine years, the pressure keeps mounting and I keep submerging. Now, I hit the bottom of the sea, and it is not smooth at all.
A friend of mine once remarked that I should often speak to a therapist. I laughed it off but I think she’s right. Sometimes I reach the office by 8am, having taken three different vehicles or four, if I take the Manduar-Brikama-Turntable-Traffic Light-Bakau route. Then, occasionally, I sit on my butt for 14hrs straight—more or less— before heading back home and, robotically, restarting the same routine the next day. That’s not the biggest challenge and it’s not why my friend said I need a therapist. It’s what happens at work. Just recently, my co-worker’s little sister was raped by a shopkeeper (I’m done saying allegedly) and, as the editor, I had to go through the raw and gory details of the incident. Of course, our job doesn’t allow us to let such graphic details reach the unsuspecting readers without a filter. So, we take the hit. If someone would be wrecked, it’s us first, and there’s no trigger warning in our case.
For weeks, I couldn’t shake off the story. I was burdened. My heart was broken. She is 9 years old with a grieving mother who lost her husband earlier. Stories like that, and those of murder, robbery, corruption, injustice and suffering— over and over, everyday— have a huge impact on my mind; on all of our minds. I feel suffocated sometimes. In the long run, either you develop a form of immunity or distaste for your job. The latter is my reality. I sat for nine years and now I have a persistent lower back pain which even acupuncture couldn’t fix. A Chinese TCM expert told me to limit the number of hours I continuously sit but, how can I?
For the past six years, I have struggled with job ambivalence; I have mixed feelings about it. I love and hate it, in equal measure. So, I made the decision to quit. More than a decade of practice and here I am, reduced to a potential blogger. At least I can blog my heart, and it is not always pleasant. I consider this a Goldilocks approach to transition into something more soothing and less depressing. The time is now, with or without suggestions. From December, Gibramble will no longer be a newspaper column. It will be a blog and a legacy I wish to keep alive for as long as I can knit words together.
