Homecoming Series By Da One
These few lines of mine are meant to be as thought provoking as the construct of national identity itself goes to define our very existence as Black Africans.
Dear reader, have you ever asked yourself the following questions:
1) How and when does the two geographical and political entities, that you are an integral part of, that is Gambia and Senegal, came to be?
2) Who has taken the decision to draw borders between “Gambia” and “Senegal”? I put the two in quotation marks because they are corrupted names of the original. They used to be called KAMBI-YAA and SEN GAAL respectively.
3) How has the creation (by white people) of this two entities shaped your identity, individuality, mentality, world view and your economic realities?
4) Who was representing you and your interest and the interest of your children’s children at this occasion that seal our fate and subject us to shame and doom?
5) What does the future hold for this conundrum of two states and “one people”? I put one people in quotation marks because several factors and forces are interplaying causing ever more cultural, social and linguistic divergence. That means what little binds these people will one day be irrelevant in the shaping of their identities. They will become culturally estranged if they already are not.
Dear reader, take time to ponder these questions and do not be satisfied with superficial answers. Dig deeper and think harder. The true answers will free your mind from what the colonialist scavengers intend you to become, i.e. a mental slave serving their divide, conquer and rule agenda.
Dear reader, I am quite sure, like I, you have blood relatives and personal friends on both sides of the border. However, try crossing these borders and you will be confronted with all kinds of bureaucratic norms inherited from the colonial savages that are meant to turn our lives into hell for us. You will be asked to either identify yourself with documents printed in French or English. Symbolically, this practice implies that our languages are too filthy to be written on their precious papers.
Second, your biometric data (fingerprint and retina scan) are taken and stored. This is done in the name of security precautions. Nothing could be further from the truth. At best, this is a waste of tax payers’ money that continues to divide a people. It’s self-defeatism that cannot achieve the aim of harmonization between two societies that should have been ONE in the first place.
Dear reader, haven’t you once heard a Gambian chastising Senegalese for being cheats and crooks? Haven’t you heard a Senegalese chastising Gambians for being too temperamental and not smart in handling any kind of transaction.
The most noticeable phenomenon though is how code-switching (borrowing of lexical items from a source language into a target language) is persistently increasing, affecting *all languages * in Gambia and Senegal. Observe the number of French and English words in any conversation and you will realize this trend affects even you and myself. It’s a disease that no one is free from. It’s a disease that presently has cure.
The Solution
Rise up you good daughters and sons of Saloum, Wallo, Dakar, Kaolack, Fatiqq, Badibu, Jarra, Bongjul, Kiang, Kombo, Niumi all other regions and tell the bourgeois (representatives of the colonial imperialist) that you won’t be part of the present political arrangements between the two countries as it presently obtains. Organize mass demonstrations at the borders and show up with one national identity document that is representative of your true identity as ONE INSEPARABLE PEOPLE. A document printed in our languages.
Dear reader, what are your answers to the questions I posed to you at the beginning of this piece?