Dear Editor,
A lot of decent people are sharing their anger about Seedy Njie, the nominated Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, and for good reason. Seedy Njie is part of a not-so-small group of anti-Mandinka tribal bigots. They are everywhere in that small country of ours, across all segments of our society.
The most insidious among them are not loudmouth like Seedy Njie who publicly telegraph their bigotry, who tend to be typically useless, unsuccessful political hooligans looking for crumbs from people. The worst are the ones who think they are smart in the way they wallow in and traffic in anti-Mandinka bigotry.
A couple of years ago, a high-profile non-Mandinka lawyer practicing in The Gambia told me how deep and pernicious this bigotry runs, even in his own social circle and among others he encounters, and he doesn’t know where all this antipathy comes from. I know where it comes from. It is a disease of the heart that education, foreign exposure, or material success can’t cure. Bigots carry a burden that they often die with. A lot of them try to pretend and put up a facade, but their true nature is never far from the surface. And the Islamic prohibition on bigotry doesn’t resonate with them either, because their iman (faith) is weak.
As someone who has a Fula mother and a Mandinka father, and Wolof uncles, I have a very good antenna when it comes to detecting anti-Mandinka bigots, from the low-life crude ones to the sophisticated and educated ones. I can smell them a mile away. And speaking of my Fula mum, her name is Ida Cham, and her grandfather, Alpha Yero Cham, is the founder of the village of Chamen in Nianija, where the Seedy Njie is from.
He has no standing in Chamen or the larger Nianija constituency. He doesn’t have political power there. The only time he tested his personal political power there was in 2017, when he ran for parliament. He lost by a landslide, gaining only 411 votes out of 3,039 cast, or 14% of the total. In his one and only test of personal standing, 86% of the people of Nianija rejected him. And to date, he has no base and no standing in his own hometown. During Yahya Jammeh’s time, he wasn’t elected to any office.
Where, then, does his purported power to target Mandinkas of The Gambia — to include ordering their arrests, terminating civil servants, denying them promotions — come from? It comes from finding in Adama Barrow a greedy, craven, corrupt, and malevolent President who is willing to trade in naked anti-Mandinka tribalism to hold onto power. Seedy Njie has no power, but he latches onto the dark instincts of Adama Barrow to go after one tribe among the diverse people of our shared country.
And Mandinkas of The Gambia are the singular and consistent targets of state-orchestrated tribal discrimination during both the Jammeh and Barrow administrations. No other tribe is singled out for discrimination. This is intolerable, and here is what I intend to do. I will fight my Seedy Njie battle not by bellyaching about how he is victimising the Mandinkas in the land of their ancestors. And I reject categorically any notion that Seedy Njie is powerful. He is not. He is just a vector for the disease that Adama Barrow represents. I will fight Seedy Njie in the Nianija I share with him to ensure that NPP loses the election there in December. This is the way to fight tribal bigots. You put them out of business and out of national life.
The rest of the anti-Mandinka bigots, like the Ku Klux Klan of the US or the neo-Nazis of Europe, will still be with us even when Barrow and his hired tribal goons are removed from the scene. They will just wallow in their hatred, whine and pout in low whispers in their social circles, but in shaa Allah they will be in no position to enforce an anti-Mandinka agenda using the instruments of government, like the police, or otherwise saying Abubacarr Darboe won’t be a director because he is a Mandinka.
And for the record, I don’t care if some don’t like me because I am Mandinka. Why? Because it is their problem and not mine. Besides, lots of good, decent people love me and I love them back. And that is good enough for me.
By Karamba Touray
USA
