An Autobiography

By Mathew K Jallow

I am the child of a random encounter. I am the product of a chance meeting, between a young attractive Tamaru drummer, and a beautiful divorcee, who carried herself with uncommon grace and stealth. But, I did not know it yet. Not until I became a teenager beginning to make sense of the world around me. In the quite life of a villager deep in the hinterland of The Gambia, I did not seek to find questions with which to turn the world on its head. The questions came to me; unsolicited. And they were plenty. In those early days, when traveling on foot and on the backs of weary donkeys was the practice, the world of my childhood was small and narrowly confined in space and time. To the west of the sleepy village of Sare Gainako where I was born, Sambang village stood, in total isolation; an old settlement of mixed tribes, a full mile and a half long, and shaped like a capital ell. I was fascinated by the glittering of the corrugated roofs of some of its houses. They stood in stark contrast to the dark, diminutive grass thatched roofed houses, which dominated Sambang’s skyline. But, I was also envious of the white corrugated roofed houses distributed unevenly around the village; from north to south. The roofs, as I was told by the older boys in my village, were the symbols of wealth, and since we did not have any in our village, it determined we were poor. But, I came to accept our poverty as our fate, yet at the back of my mind, I kept wishing my father might someday just make enough money to build corrugated roofed houses over our heads to keep us dry when it rained. From the distance, the people of Sambang looked like ants mingling with their livestock at an old village well on the east side of the village. Every evening around five-thirty, the villagers would congregate at the old well to water their cattle herds. My oldest sister lived there. She was married to the village chief’s younger brother, yet Sambang was a mystery to me; a mystery that had to be unraveled; much like a jigsaw puzzle. When the summer heat wave reached its peak on the mercury scale, simmering mirages, visible in the distance, only intensified the mystery, which engulfed Sambang. It was this mystery that created my fascination with the village. And I dreamt of escaping the crushing confinement that my own village imposed on me, to see Sambang with my own eyes; at last.

A mere fifty feet wide shrub line separated Sambang’s farmland from our village land, but it was the people there who I did not know what they looked like, that captured my innocent childhood imagination and piqued my curiosity. Sambang village to me, was the emblem of the mystery of the unknown; an unknown that had to be explored. Occasionally, I sat under a big tabahyee tree, right in the middle of the shrub line that separated Sambang from our village, to gaze at nothing in particular, and everything generally, but wandered aloud about the things in my life that did not make any sense. Only when the deafening solitude became frighteningly unbearable, did I run back to the village bantaye to join the boys of my age to listen to the elders snooze, gossip about their wives, pass judgment about others whose lives’ was none of their business, or pass powdered tobacco around to drug themselves all afternoon long. In our village, a tall dark man, who had arthritis in his feet and walked crookedly and painfully, was the gossiper in chief. Every one knew that, and he was in the good books of the women of the village, because he always recounted the gossips he heard from the men at the bantaye. Whenever an elder at the bantaye, snored, we giggled mockingly and only ran away if another elder reprimanded us. And rarely too, when an elder farted in their sleep, the young ones were given license to laugh out loud, just like the elders did. The fart became the topic of infectious humor for days, and was often communicated from our villages to the neighborhood villages by the travelers who came through the village.

One late afternoon, I was sitting under my favorite tabahyee tree, in the middle of the shrub line, which separated Sambang and my village, when a lonely bird, high up amidst the thick canopy of a nearby shrub, began whistling mournful song to an audience only it could see. As I listened, I was able to compose my own song, in my own head, with the melody of a bird I could not see. I was pretty sure the bird was watching me; watching my every move; for every now and then, when I shouted out at the top of my voice to scare the bird and make it shut up, and it responded by not singing; but only for a little while. And sure enough, soon the bird would resume its colorful display of musical range and genius, often reaching a pitched crescendo thereafter; paying no mind to me or my sensibilities. Whenever the bird reached its crescendo in song, nothing could make it shut up, and no matter how hard I shouted out, the bird could care less. It would not listen to me. The song the bird sang that evening, replayed effortlessly in my head for several days after that, and no matter what I did, I could not stop the melody from oozing into my consciousness. Often, even a faint musical tune carried by the wind, from the distance, triggered remembrance of the song from my subconscious memory. But, at other times, the song simply popped in my head ungraciously, for no apparent reason. In the end, the song became my secret anthem to everything unknown and mysterious. And in so doing, it to me became synonymous with Sambang village. For each time I though of Sambang, the song came into my mind, and each time the song came into my mind, Sambang came into my thoughts. Needless to say, this only had the effect of deepening the mystery that is Sambang; a mystery slowly taking over my life. And as the aura of Sambang village continued to capture my imagination, I yearned to go there; to see its people and marvel at its corrugated roofed houses. Sambang village, sitting all two miles from our village, had become a childhood obsession. It captured me and now I did not know how to escape it.

On the east side of our village, Sare Demba, a village similar to ours in every imaginable way, stood uninvitingly. Unlike Sambang, I was often mad at Sare Demba for standing between me and the villages of Dungal and Sinchu Jombo to the east of it. I often heard the traveling salesmen who came to our village; speak glowingly of Dungal and Sinchu Jombo villages. In my imagination, I packaged a ready image of what the two villages looked like; all because I was unable to see them with my own eyes. The nameless hilly ridge separating Dungal and Sinchu Jombo from our village stood in the way, to prevent me seeing the villages. But for some odd reason, my mind was made-up to blame Sare Demba for this cardinal sin, and nothing would change my mind. In my opinion, Sare Demba village in its entirety ought to have been situated farther south; near the mosquito infested marshlands by the river. In Sare Demba, my father had a friend he confided with, who was also the brother of his wife and he went there often. As the leader of a musical group that traveled all summer long to play at Fula weddings, my father always came and went all summer. In the Fula culture and tradition, February to June each year is reserved for weddings. It is the time when Fula girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen were married away to young men chosen for them at an early age; usually before the girls even turn seven years. But, it was not out the range of possibility that a new born baby girl would be betrothed to a young man, however, such privileged betrothals rarely happened outside of the closely knit family circle; like a sister’s daughter being given to her own brother’s son, or the opposite. Because my dad and his group were the only one of their kind in our area, they performed their musical magic in every wedding that happened in our area. It was on one such trip that my father met a young divorcee he was smitten by in Yuna Angaleh, a village close to the border with Senegal. Yuna Angaleh was a two and half days journey west of our village across the crocodile infested river. In those days, distances were measured, not in miles, but by the number of days and weeks it took to walk to a destination. When my father returned home one day, after a trip to a wedding beyond the river, the village elders, at the urging of my father’s family, scrambled to send two emissaries with colanuts, gifts of money and a cow to ask for the hand of the lady he had fallen in love with. After the required Fula customs and rites were completed to the girl’s family satisfaction, my father was allowed to marry his Casanova. The beautiful divorcee, who caught my father’s eyes, became my mother almost a year to the date she was married my father.

Sare Gainako village sits quietly below a range of hills that ran east to west for more than two hundreds of miles. In some areas, the river cut out wide gorges through the hill range to ease its westward flow. Every time it rained heavily, water run off from the hills above the village, snaked its way hurriedly through our village as it headed south towards the open river. I was sure the river’s depth was infinite, and that no amount of rain could fill it. But, whenever the river filled to capacity, it busted its bank to fill the low lying swamp knee deep with water. This moistened the dark, muddy ground and enabled the women of the village to grow the vegetables and rice that nourished us. Our village consists of just eleven compounds; and the two largest ones were related by family bloodline. The elders from the two main compounds alternated the village chieftaincy. Our village had more land than we used in the cropping season. At the beginning of the cropping season every year, landless migrant workers came from as far as Bissau, Guinea and Mali to seek land on which to grow crops for themselves and their families back home. Our village elders were always generous with the land we owned; often telling the migrant workers that God destined for them to come to our village, and that our village must never disobey God’s order that required them to help the needy. Most of the “migrant workers” who came to our village returned home after the harvest, never to be seen again. Occasionally, however, some stayed, got married to girls or women of their tribe or sect in the area, and settled down for good. One day, when I was about five or six years old, migrant workers of a different kind came to our village. They wanted land too, but for a different purpose. It was the pivotal, history altering day in the life of our village. At first, everyone in our small village looked at the two strange “red men” with a certain degree of perplexity and incertitude. Some children hid behind their mothers, or tucked themselves neatly between the legs of their fathers, their eyes shut, out of fear of the color of the “red men” and faces turned towards the ground. The “red men” as we called them in our Fula dialect, turned out to be the Irish missionaries, who would take me out of my childhood misery. Earlier on, they had been denied land by a number of villages east; Sare Demba, Dungal and Sinchu Jombo. Now our village was their last best hope. But, the village meeting at the village bantaye, however, turned raucous as soon as it started. The Rev. Father Michael Maloney, who later became Bishop of Banjul, and the Rev. Father James White, were the two at the village meeting that day. The village chief, Mama Abdou, had decided to deny their request for land. But, his decision turned out to be only the beginning of the story.

Ba Samba Egge Jallow, my father’s older brother, a tall fiery, alcohol drinking warrior, was a man no one in our area wanted to mess with. Our village chief, Mama Abdou, was his biggest nemesis, and he often spark an argument to provoke a fight, physically if need be, with the village chief. Ba Samba was the son of Gainako Jallow, the founder of our village, and he was next in line for the village chieftaincy. Moreover, he was in control of more land that the village chief and could make land decisions independent of the village chief. Late that summer, when the two missionaries returned to lay claim to the swat of land given to them earlier in the year, the animosity between our feuding families had subsided to a tolerable level. There was euphoria in the air, when the missionaries began their work. Villagers; men, women and children went to help the missionaries plant trees, fetch water for the masonry workers and did chores that did not require any formal skill. Slowly, out of the ground like a phoenix, the outlines of school classrooms and a chapel began to rise. The excitement among the boys in the village was palpable. Tomorrow will be a new day.

To be continued...

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