By Lt Colonel Samsudeen Sarr (Rtd)
Former Commander, The Gambia National Army
I warmly welcome and salute the Government of Senegal for its brotherly and pan-Africanist offer to open its stadiums to Gambian international matches. This gesture is not an act of charity but a quiet reminder of an inconvenient historical truth. That Senegal and The Gambia are one people separated by colonial ink and cartographic vanity.
The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 sliced us apart with European rulers and trained us to see one another through foreign lenses, France on one side, Britain on the other. Independence in the 1960s should have shattered that mental prison. Instead, we polished its bars and reinforced its locks. Nearly a century later, we still treat the colonial border as sacred scripture while our shared history is treated as optional reading.
What ought to bind us geographically, culturally, linguistically, and genetically has repeatedly been defeated by political insecurity and small-minded calculations.
For years, The Gambia has played its so-called “home” matches in Morocco because we lack CAF- and FIFA-approved stadiums. That alone is a national embarrassment. But a deeper humiliation is that when forced to play abroad, we chose Morocco over Senegal.
Senegal is next door. It is cheaper, closer, and socially natural. Gambian fans could flood Dakar by road. Senegalese fans would swell the stands beside them. The Scorpions would play before a crowd that speaks their football language.
Morocco, by contrast, is thousands of miles away. It is not ECOWAS. It is not culturally entangled with us. It has no emotional investment in Gambian football. But we went there because we asked, perhaps even begged. But how many Gambians can afford flights to North Africa? And what psychological advantage does a team gain from playing before a crowd whose applause is politely indifferent?
When Senegal lifted the Africa Cup of Nations trophy in Morocco, Gambians danced in the streets as if it were ours. That was not sentimentality but real identity. And when Senegal promised to bring the Afcon trophy to Banjul, it was acknowledging the simple truth that Gambian fans belong to Senegal’s football family.
So why should Gambian football feel more at home in North Africa than in Dakar?
Last Friday I listened to Ambassador Ebou Ndure on Coffee Time with Peter Gomez and agreed with him that Gambian foreign policy must not be “one-size-fits-all.” That Senegal is not just another country. It is our only neighbour. It wraps around us geographically and historically. Any foreign policy that treats Senegal as diplomatically equivalent to Morocco, Turkey, or any distant power is intellectually sluggish and politically reckless.
Where I part ways with Ambassador Ndure is his description of the collapse of the Senegambia Confederation as a “trivial predicament that could have easily been resolvable.” There was nothing trivial about the causes. To describe it as such is to turn history into polite fiction.
The Confederation (1982–1989) rose from the ashes of the 1981 Kukoi Samba Sanyang rebellion. Senegal intervened militarily at enormous cost. From that moment, Dakar concluded that Gambian instability required political absorption-one state, one army, one economy, one currency, with the presidency permanently Senegalese and the vice-presidency Gambian.
Most Senegalese accepted this logic while most Gambians did not.
To Gambians, the massive Senegalese troop presence resembled not partnership but guardianship of a PPP government that had already ruled for seventeen years and had survived a bloody uprising. Two presidents therefore walked in opposite directions. Abdou Diouf pursued federation and Sir Dawda Jawara pursued autonomy without Senegalese protection.
That is why Jawara invited the British Army Training Team in 1984, for the first time, breaching the Confederation’s security protocol and rebuilding a separate Gambian army. The Gambia National Army was born in 1984 and reached battalion strength by 1988.
However, the second visible crack in the Confederation appeared in April 1989, when war nearly broke out between Senegal and Mauritania. Under the 1982 protocol, Gambian troops were expected to fight alongside Senegal. But Sir Dawda Jawara drew a firm line. He told President Abdou Diouf that Gambian soldiers would not be dragged into a war with Mauritania. The Gambia chose mediation over mobilisation and neutrality over entanglement. Ultimately, international diplomacy cooled the crisis, and war was averted; but the political fault line inside the Confederation was laid bare.
In August 1989, Sir Dawda demanded a rotating presidency. Abdou Diouf countered in September by withdrawing Senegal entirely from the accord. Senegalese troops departed. The Gambian army was still young and fragile. The vacuum was inevitable. The 1994 coup was its logical offspring.
This was not a trivial misunderstanding. It was a collision of political destinies.
So, to me, Senegal’s stadium offer is not merely about football. I see it as a mirror held up to The Gambia’s leaders. It asks the blunt question of whether we want symbolic unity or practical cooperation?
If we cannot cooperate with Senegal in sport, the least controversial arena of national life, then our speeches about integration, Ecowas solidarity, and pan-Africanism will remain theatrical slogans without substance.
Gambian football cannot grow better in Morocco than in Senegal. You can bank that!
