The Visit, Part One
on Phil Bradfield (The Gambia), 20/Jul/2010 09:51, 34 days ago
(Written 14/07/2010 12:30pm, RED5, Janjanbureh)Since the morning the town had been buzzing, its population swelled many times over by the influx of people eager to witness the day’s events. They’d come from miles around, by foot and by bike, by gelli and by donkey cart, and now most of them were thronging the North Ferry terminal, a shifting kaleidoscope of brightly-coloured dresses and robes and t-shirts: blues, pinks, yellows, greens. Especially greens.Their hours-long wait in the heat hadn’t dampened their anticipation; if anything it had sharpened it to a razor edge. The band played, thekankurangsshrieked, howled and whirled, and the drums were so feverish they blended into one incessant roll, but suffusing it all was an anticipation so thick you could bite it.As the big ferry calledJames Island, brought up the river specially to supplement the town’s usual little runabout, shuttled back and forth, every landing was greeted with increasing fervour by the gathered masses. Trucks full of cattle and sheep, police and military vehicles crammed full of soldiers, four-by-fours too numerous to count, all were greeted with euphoric screams and the waving of neem branches. And then finally, as theJames Islandfinished picking yet another load from the far side of the river and turned to chug back to us, we saw it, right at the back of the ferry: a jet black stretched-Hummer, windows blacked out, three soldiers with assault rifles perched amongst a jumble of boxes on the flatbed. He’d arrived.The mood escalated to a frenzy now, led by the frenetic drumming and thekankurangsputting their all into this one dance. The onlookers surged forward, and the police on crowd control duty responded: orders were shouted, threats made, sticks brandished, and as quickly as it had advanced, the crowd was fleeing back from the road to the safety of the verges. They watched as the squat, gleaming machine ground across the ferry’s ramp and onto dry land, where it sat like a gigantic, menacing beetle, daring the surrounding hoards to try anything. And behind it, surrounded by a posse of soldiers, police, party members in their deep green uniform and assorted other functionaries, was the cause of the commotion, which reached its peak as the crowd spotted him: a small, portly man dressed in brilliant white robes, a white skull cap perched on his head. The President of The Gambia, His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh.Waving to the crowd, the President shook hands with the local dignitaries who had been reserved pride of place in front of everybody else, before disappearing back into his truck. As this was some obscure cue, the guards on the back started opening up the boxes surrounding them; what was inside?Suddenly, the President’s head and shoulders popped out of the Humvee’s sunroof like a Whack-a-mole. As the vehicle started rolling down the road into town, the soldiers passed him forward two of the opened boxes and, as one, all four started pulling out foot-long cylinders from the boxes and throwing them into the crowd. Packets of biscuits.This was when it turned into a near riot, people of all ages fighting, pushing, falling over one another in their exertions to snatch at the flying tubes. The crowd developed sudden currents and surges like some maddened human ocean, people stumbling as the sudden buffets threw them this way and that. And still the biscuits flew, the sea developing new whirlpools wherever a pack landed.The chaos slowly edged up the high street, the crawling Hummer always at its centre. At one point, the President got bored with lobbing individual packets and heaved a whole box of biscuits out of the car. It burst as it hit high up the side wall of the police station, showering those below with goodies. As people fell behind the carnage, so they’d disappear down a side street, sprinting down a parallel street to get back ahead of the convoy earn another chance at the presidential cookie lottery.The growling Humvee finally pushed through the throbbing high street and rolled onto a quieter stretch of road. Behind it, a deafening, colourful riot followed, walking and dancing and running after the forbidding machine as the President led his people on a chaotic, triumphant procession which would finish just a couple of kilometres further on at the site of The Gambia’s latest big engineering project: the newly-completed Sulaymane Junkung Jammeh Bridge, ready for Presidential inauguration.