“We would become nothing more than a province of Senegal.” I have heard that sentence in many forms, and I will not pretend it is foolish. It comes from a real place, perhaps even a primal place of self-preservation. Chances are, you are thinking it right now. We live beside Senegal on three sides, and once we tried to unite with her. It did not end well. A fear with a history deserves a hearing, so let us give it one. I should say why I do not speak of sovereignty lightly. When the coup-makers seized Banjul in 1981, my cousin IJK Tambajang, whose father and my mother shared a father, led the resistance against the coup-makers until help arrived from Senegal. He was as tall as his name. Tambajang in Mandinka means “long spear,” and it had replaced the family name Darie, on account of a particularly tall and fierce ancestor several grandfathers ago, whose well-known favorite weapon in war was the long spear. “They can’t kill me,” was his puzzling retort. “I’ll take you home.” My cousin escorted him back to Lancaster and Mosque Road, where we lived at the time, and then returned to his war. He and his mother are gone now, and so is my brother. I remember them in the days of struggle for our liberties against tyranny. My family fought to keep The Gambia a country. I am not emotionless about it. But I am also practical. If sovereignty exists to preserve the compact between a people and their country, we are failing at it mightily. A flag that cannot protect its citizens, feed them or hold its own territory in a crisis is not in compliance with its constitutional obligations. So let us name what the fear of my prominent friend from the last column is really about – domination. He was right about that. But he was also wrong about what we should conclude from that fear. The coup-makers kidnapped his mother to force his surrender. He did not, and she survived. When we heard he had been killed, my brother Foday- named after my maternal grandfather – went searching for him in the streets of Banjul. As my brother told it, he turned a comer and found himself staring into the barrel of my cousin’s gun. “What are you doing here?” he boomed, perhaps thinking my brother was one of the many looters.
“We heard you were killed …” In December 1981, after Senegalese troops helped put down a coup attempt in Banjul, the two countries signed a treaty. On February 01, 1982 the Senegambia Confederation began. Senegal assumed the presidency and The Gambia was its deputy. A confederal army was raised, about two-thirds Senegalese and one-third Gambian. A parliament and a secretariat were also created. Then came the arguments, as they always do. Senegal wanted a customs union and a shared currency. The Gambia, a trading country that lived on low tariffs, said miss me with all that. Senegal’s president then called The Gambia “an accident of history” – on account of the legend that Britain only carved out of Senegal roughly 6 miles on either side of a river that runs through it, which was the distance canons on its ships could defend. It implied The Gambia was not a real country and rightly belonged to Senegal. Gambians heard it loud and clear. In August 1989, when trouble flared with Mauritania, Senegal pulled its troops out of The Gambia without any conversation. The confederation was dissolved that September. President Diouf’s comment confirmed the Gambian fear that Senegal did not respect the country’s sovereignty. Gambians did not want to be a province of Senegal and this sentiment still endures. It is tempting to conclude that union failed in Senegambia between people who are practically blood relatives, therefore – and here is the logical fallacy – the United States of Africa cannot work either. That is like looking at a collapsed bridge and concluding that rivers cannot be crossed. Or predicting from the story of Cain and Abel that every younger brother ends up murdered. We had 2 countries, one far larger than the other; we had two armies pretending to be one; two economies with different rules; and one domineering president who wanted more than could be had. In a union of two, the small partner sits across the table from exactly one counterpart. Every dispute is one against one, and the one is bigger and the smaller is vulnerable. The Gambia had one-seventh of Senegal’s population and less than one twentieth of its economy. Senegambia was born of an emergency, not a shared long-term purpose. When the coup crisis faded, so did the reason for the union. What was left was the fear which was present from the very beginning. Who protects Gambians from their protector? Mandinka and Wolof, Jola and Fula, live on both sides of the border. Union fixed them in a power ratio, and whoever stood on the small side of it is a minority forever, however warm the goodwill of the majority. The fault is not of the people but of math. The fear of being a permanent minority is the fear of the tyranny of the majority, and it was never irrational. So the fear was right to make Gambia cautious, but it was wrong to let it dictate the lessons of dissolution. What Senegambia teaches is narrower and harder than “union fails”, or that an even bigger union would fail faster and harder. A union endures if it adequately addresses the jealousies of its parts. Senegambia did the opposite. Senegal brought a dominant country’s habits and it all summed up to an imminent threat of relegation to provincial status for The Gambia. Abdou Diouf, I think briefly lost his mind when he called us an “accident of history”! My God, which African country isn’t? Count the African nations that escaped the butcher’s table in Berlin, and you’ll need one finger. Two, if you’re generous to Liberia. I respectfully decline to explain the meaning of either. Remember a bunch of white folks, a table, pencils, and rulers in Berlin circa November 15 1884 – February 26, 1885? If not an accident of history, what was that, a conjugal session between France and Africa about the birth of a planned child, Senegal?
An accident that calls another an accident has forgotten its own birth certificate. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, the Senegambian institutions were too thin to hold a quarrel. No union of two can neutralise any of this. Every bilateral or regional union would do the same, because a handful of members cannot dilute one another’s flaws. Senegal pushed and The Gambia feared a trade of imperial Britain for imperial Senegal. It recoiled. But upon sober reflection, recoil is just as deadly as its predator – domination. It is tragic my friend could not see, scale is the neutralizer of fear, for when there is sufficient scale, no member’s strength or weakness can set the tone. One state’s corruption, one community’s ambition, one capital’s habits become a small share of the whole, offset by the rest and answerable to institutions none of them controls. That is why the cure is bigger, not smaller. Indeed, much bigger. In a federation of the continent, The Gambia does not fear Senegal because it does not face Senegal. It stands among more than fifty states and Senegal is just one, not even the one. Alliances form around interests, not borders or even worse, tribes. On any vote The Gambia has company, and on many questions Senegal herself is on our side. African countries share a problem – tribe. The Gambia has a handful of communities each large enough to dream of holding the State, but none is large enough to hold it for good. When the prize is one center, every election is a contest between rivals, and defeat can feel like exile. That is not just a Gambian defect. It is a defect that has broken many African countries. Union does not solve it by asking the rivals to love one another. Love and trust are the best things in life but arguably the worst foundation for a country, for you cannot legislate them and they seldom survive the first bad harvest. Nor does union solve it by the arithmetic of one large bloc outvoting the rest. That is the same problem only requiring a bigger gun. But a gun pointed at a neighbor feels like war, not peace. Instead, union solves it by changing what it takes to win. The key is the infinite possibilities of coalitions, and therefore infinite paths to power. Resistance here is not futile. It is a viable, dynamic, democratic, and constitutional, path to power, that everyone can engage. Of the many hundreds if not thousands of tribes in Africa, only ten reach even one percent of the continent’s total population, and the largest, the Hausa, are about 4.4 per cent. No tribe can supply anything near fifty percent plus one as a permanent majority. Even Senegal’s largest tribe would be a drop in the continental bucket. The only way to a majority is an idea that appeals to people who share nothing but the idea, be it a road, a school, a job, justice on demand, or the freedom of pissing on the side of a road on ta late night walk home. In a federation of the whole, a majority is not a bloc to be mobilised but a coalition to be forged. The candidate who speaks only to his tribe loses to the one who speaks to the farmer, the trader and the nurse in every tribe. In our countries, we cannot see the country for the tribe. In a union of the whole, tribe is diversity, not division. Thus tribe, which is a cw-se in a country because the prize is worth capturing, becomes a blessing in a large union because no one can win by it alone and we are all proud of having one. None of this is new. In 1787 James Madison, defending the American union in Federalist No. 10, made a similar argument. The danger in a republic is faction, a majority bound together by a common passion against the rest. His remedy was not to wish it away but to enlarge the republic. In a large republic interest multiply, and no single group or coalition can be a lasting majority. In that sense, I add, union offers an infinite possibility of coalitions and with it a realistic opportunity for ascendancy by any. Africa in its fulsome diversity, choreographs chaos into harmony. That is the elegance of the continent as a union. Senegambia was the opposite case. In a union of two, the larger partner is the majority every day and, on every question, and the smaller is a minority in all things except fear. The fear of becoming a province is the oldest fear in politics. The tyranny of the majority cannot be rejected offhand. Where one group can be a permanent majority, everyone else is always an election away from tyranny. Make the republic large enough and the fear loses its foothold. Here is what is true but unsaid. We are already in Senegal’s grip, without having cast a single vote. She surrounds us. Our trade and our roads run through her. When there is a dispute at the border it is settled between two capitals, one much stronger than the other. Fragmentation does not protect us from Senegal. It leaves us alone with her. So what does this say of Union and the path thereto? To the gradualist the first step is always “start with your neighbors.” Region first, continent someday. For The Gambia the neighbor is Senegal, and the first step is Senegambia, the very union we have just buried. The gradualist offers us the two country trap and calls it prudence. Nor will a regional union do. A region cannot neutralise its members’ faults any more than two neighbors could. West Africa is Senegambia with more neighbors and a bigger bully – here’s looking t you Nigeria! Union that is not continental only changes the bully. And look at the record of the slow road:
• The Mali Federation (Senegal and French Sudan), April 1959 to August 1960. Dead.
• The Union of African States (Ghana, Guinea, Mali), 19 5 8 to 1963. Dead.
• The East African Community (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda), 1967 to 1977. Dead. Resurrected in 2000. It is likely to die again.
• Senegambia, 1982 to 1989. Dead.
• The Arab Maghreb Union, founded 1989. Its last summit was in 1994. Might as well be dead. Its unanimity rule lets one quarrel stop everything. Whoever said 2 heads are better than one never met a polycephalous polity – which is monstrous, not genius.
