By Kebeli Demba Nyima
In the latter years of his life, Michael Jackson undertook one of the most elaborate acts of self-reinvention in modern history. He altered his face, his voice, even the shade of his skin, yet could not renegotiate how the world chose to see him. Reinvention is private. Recognition is public, and far less forgiving.
It is an unlikely but instructive analogy for Gambian politics. Some months ago, President Adama Barrow described himself as a “ndongo Banjul.” The remark travelled well. It was a neat political gesture, an appeal to shared identity, lightly packaged for public consumption. He spoke of his formative years in the capital, of discipline learned in a Sarahuli household, and of proximity to the rhythms of Banjul life.
Ndongo Banjul, as a social idea rather than a geographical space, is not merely where one lives; it is where one is recognised to belong. And here lies the deeper absurdity. One may live in Banjul for decades, speak its language, adopt its rhythms, and yet remain, in the eyes of certain elites, perpetually on probation. Belonging, in this sense, is not earned. It is inherited, guarded, and, when necessary, withheld. One may say, with a touch of mischief, that Banjul operates less as a city and more as a club, an old club with unwritten rules, selective membership, and a rather inflated sense of its own importance.
It is here that the president’s formulation begins to look cautious, even selective. When he spoke of prejudice, he gestured towards Pipeline and Fajara, as though the phenomenon were peripheral. It is not. If he wished to be precise, he would have named Banjul itself, for it is there that this culture of guarded belonging finds its oldest and most refined expression.
But that would have required a political risk bordering on self-sabotage. For a man who has already declared himself a “ndongo Banjul,” to indict Banjul would be to undermine his own claim. It would be, in effect, to shoot himself in the leg. The omission, therefore, was not an oversight. It was calculation.
And it is not unique to him. His predecessors understood the same social gravity. Dawda Kairaba Jawara, a provincial figure who rose to national leadership, appeared keenly aware of the symbolic weight of Banjul acceptance. His marriage into an Aku family, and his brief conversion to Christianity, were not merely personal decisions; they were gestures of alignment with an urban social order that carried disproportionate cultural authority. Even his name, shifting from Dawda to David in that period, reflected a moment of accommodation.
His successor, Yahya Jammeh, approached the same terrain differently but with equal awareness. Though he arrived with the rhetoric of rupture and provincial assertion, he initially surrounded himself with figures drawn from the very Banjul networks he would later distrust. The arrangement did not endure. One by one, those early allies were cast aside. The entanglement proved unstable; the break was inevitable.
The pattern, however, extends beyond presidents. Many among the provincial intelligentsia have pursued acceptance through subtler means, including marriage into Banjul families, strategic association, cultivated accents, and careful self-presentation. It is a long social apprenticeship undertaken in the hope of softening exclusion. Some succeed partially. Few succeed entirely.
It is here that William Shakespeare offers a more precise language for what is otherwise difficult to name. In Othello, the Moor stands as a man of rank, competence, and proven authority. He is a general, entrusted with command and respected in function. Yet he is never permitted to escape the label imposed upon him. He is not simply Othello; he is “the Moor.” The title precedes him, defines him, and confines him.
This is the enduring power of social labelling.
Shakespeare understood, long before modern sociology gave it vocabulary, that society does not merely describe individuals; it categorises them. Once categorised, the individual is forced to live within that frame, no matter his achievements. Othello’s tragedy is not merely jealousy; it is the gradual internalisation of how others see him. He begins as a commander and ends as a man trapped within a label he did not create but could not escape.
The relevance is neither theatrical nor distant. In Gambian society, labels operate with subtle but decisive force. One is not merely a citizen; one is provincial or urban, insider or outsider, Banjulian or something less precise. These distinctions are not harmless. They shape perception, influence acceptance, and determine, often silently, the limits of belonging.
It is within this framework that President Barrow’s now-famous remark at the Banjul waterfront, during the commissioning of a new ferry, must be understood. When he said that his “only crime is being president,” and, by implication, being a man from a small village in Basse who now occupies the highest office in the land, he was not offering an excuse for his government’s failures. He was pointing, however cautiously, to a structural discomfort: that leadership, in certain circles, is expected to conform not only to constitutional legitimacy but also to social approval.
Indeed, he was pointing to a truth that many recognise but few articulate: that there exists, particularly among certain self-appointed intellectual circles in places like Banjul, Fajara, and Pipeline, a lingering belief that leadership is not merely to be elected, but to be approved, preferably by them. It is, in essence, a theory of political birthright masquerading as intellectual judgment. These circles, often loud in their proclamations of standards and seriousness, operate with an unspoken assumption that they are more qualified, more urbane, and more entitled to shape national direction than others. Education, exposure, and urban residence are assembled into a hierarchy of legitimacy, at the top of which they reliably place themselves.
The reaction to Barrow’s statement was therefore entirely predictable. What he said was plain. What followed was theatre. Within hours, figures such as Nyang Njie and others of that disposition had taken to social media with remarkable energy, branding the president everything from anti-intellectual to anti-urban to divisive. The speed of the outrage was impressive; the substance of it was less so. A straightforward sentence was treated as though it required forensic analysis, when in truth it required only honest reading. If one cannot grasp the meaning of “my only crime is being president,” then the difficulty lies not in the sentence, but in the reader.
None of this places the president above criticism. His administration must be judged, as all administrations are, on its record. But criticism, if it is to retain credibility, must be grounded in argument rather than instinct, in evidence rather than inherited assumption.
To describe a hierarchy is not to invent it. To name a pattern is not to create it.
What Barrow did, perhaps inadvertently, was expose a tension that has long existed but rarely been acknowledged with such clarity. He did not divide the country; he revealed a division that had already taken root. He did not attack intellectual life; he questioned a disposition that confuses social comfort with national consensus.
In doing so, he touched a nerve. And in politics, as in the tragedies of William Shakespeare, it is often the nerve, rather than the argument, that reveals the more uncomfortable truth.
