Long Read

Inside the brain and mind of a modern and educated ethnic bigot

For me, one of the most disturbing facts about public discourse in the Gambia, including intellectual exchanges, is rampant, if not default, deployment of ethnic, religious, and political sentiments. 

Confronted with issues of moral urgency that demand the taking of principled positions, far too many Gambians find comfort in embarrassing expediencies shaped by ethnic, religious, and political affiliation.

I want to suggest that this particular malaise ranks high in the menu of toxins ravaging the Gambian body politic. 

Furthermore, the tragedy is a greater pity that this specific pathology has infected a wide and widening section of that demographic group that answers to the Gambia’s intelligentsia. 

Demonising people based on invariable attributes that are incidental to their humanity, such as ethnicity, caste, political affiliation, and religious affiliation, is akin to condemning them even before they were born. 

Malcolm X once called that the worst crime that can ever be committed. Let the toxic, hateful ignorance stop Now! When ethnic bigotry, politics, and politicians masquerades as patriots and patriotism, then know that we have a real problem in The Gambia. 

Perhaps it is time we finally stopped pretending that the Gambia will eventually “age out” of ethnic bigotry and political tribalism? It seems a lot of the people spewing hate are pretty young and educated folks with impressive credentials from prestigious universities and lived abroad with a broader worldview. 

In every age, it has been the tyrant, the narcissist, and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism,  ethnicity, and religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it” Malcolm X.

This quotation above reminds me of how educated and sophisticated Gambians became self-centered and thoughtless morons consumed with irrational ethnic chauvinism. They misuse grace and blindly dodge reality. 

As humans, we are for sure have corrupt and prejudicial minds. Not necessary because we are paid, deluded, or deceived by another human, but for self-interests and our essential self-enhancement bias. 

We deliberately shunned right and wrong because the decision-makers were not from our sides. For example, when President Yahya Jammeh was the President of the  Gambia, some Jola groups called him their son and belonged to them, forgetting that Yahya Jammeh was more extensive than some parts of the country. He was the President of the Republic of the Gambia. He was President for all Gambians.

Furthermore, the same things now happen to  President Adama Barrow; when the United Democratic Party leader  Ousainou Darboe once claimed that “Barrow is our Barrow, come rain or shine” and some people accepted his Mandinka ethnicity identity and, in later years, President Barrow was also disowned as a non-Mandingo, forgetting his persona as the President of the Republic of the Gambia. 

When should Gambians stop deviation and face reality? When should we be civilized to focus on the Gambian development and leave tiny ideas? 

Sometimes humans, especially Africans, and specifically Gambians, because of our diversity in ethnicity, religion, and elite cultural hegemony and regional dichotomy, paved the way by haggardly draining our intellect and bringing us down like toddlers no matter what level of education we have. 

These attitudes also influence Gambians when it comes to an argument or choice. Their accumulated education does not work there. 

It would be best to be disappointed when a  highly educated person defends a leader who does wrong and insists on making others believe his point. That is few to mention about subjective statements by Gambians.

It is dispiriting enough to run into unlettered Gambians who cannot see the right or wrong of any issue without first wearing their ethnic or religious lens. 

However, it becomes sordid when those seemingly educated overlook matters of profound import through the lazy, easy, hardly pertinent prism of ethnic aggregations or religious affiliations. 

Such haste to seize and spout ethnic jingoism or religious jingles raises serious questions about the form and content of education in The Gambia. At its best, education is a tool that frees and enlarges the mind, enabling the educated to see matters without the blinkers of ignorance or parochial platitudes.

When we see the Gambia’s parade of impressive credentials like  Magna Cum Laude and Summa Cum Laude or even  PhDs act and speak as if their particular ethnicity or religion defines each issue, we must pause and ask salient questions. 

One fundamental question: Is possessing an academic degree (or degrees) synonymous with being educated? Another way of posing the question is: Do degrees and diplomas translate into education? Is there a correlation between acquiring a string of credentials and cultivating an enlightened outlook?

During graduation ceremonies, the graduates have been found worthy “in character and learning” to deserve the bestowal of degrees. 

However, where lies the “character” when many of the graduates of Gambian and foreign schools are willing participants in unethical activities, including primitive, criminal accumulation of wealth and ethnic bigotry and discriminations? 

Where resides the “learning” when so many of our graduates are ever willing to subordinate principle to ethnic or religious rationalizations?

Perhaps, then, some of the Gambians we glibly refer to as educated are merely “certificated.” The difference is crucial. A woman or man may cram up some economic theories or principles of moral philosophy without having the slightest clue how to apply them in real life. 

Such a person would regurgitate the crammed information in an exam to earn a high grade and an impressive certificate. However, ask them to apply the “knowledge” in the dynamic praxis of lived experience—and you see certified incompetence.

I recalled, In the 1980s, the novelist Chinua Achebe needed to rebuke a group of academics at the University of Lagos for evincing a narrow, stultified vision of education. 

Here is what happened. Professor Achebe had given an interview to the then Concord newspaper. He lamented the cataclysmic decline in the quality of education in Nigerian universities. His criticism drew the ire of some African academics. 

In separate interviews, these critics sought to dismiss Achebe’s argument. One accused Achebe of making a pronouncement with no “scientific” proof. He then asserted that the spoken English standard of the average undergraduate was superior to Achebe’s. 

Another—sociologist, according to the Concord newspaper, reminded Achebe that each discipline has and uses its jargon. A third, an economist, voiced his disdain for fiction, stating that he had no use for novels. Nevertheless, he concluded that he missed nothing by not reading books.

Appalled by the substandard quality of the responses, Achebe riposted that his critics had inadvertently made his case far more eloquently about fallen standards than he did initially. 

To the critic who accused him of creating an “unscientific” claim, Achebe wondered how the counter-claim about the average student’s spoken English standard measured up as “scientific.”

He reminded the sociologist that each discipline has its terminology but that the most learned people can rise above the esoteric tongue of their discipline to communicate to a broad audience in an elegant language. 

He held up Bertrand Russell, the Nobel prize-winning philosopher mathematician, as an exemplar of the educated person who could transcend disciplinary claustrophobia. 

Achebe had some bad news for the novel-detesting economist. He told the man that he loses much in culture and enlightenment in denying himself the insights and pleasures of fiction—and would not even be a good economist. 

Achebe categorised the criticism of his assertion that educational standards had declined dramatically as a case of “combative ignorance rabidly trumpeting its values.”

I am willing to suggest—scientific proof or not—that educational standards in the Gambia have further declined significantly since Achebe’s claim in the mid-1980s. 

The Internet’s invention and spread have afforded once repressed groups easy access to expressive platforms and facilitated the articulation of abhorrent, pathological attitudes. 

One is constantly shocked by the ethnoreligious name-calling between the Gambia Diaspora groups on Internet forums. The dirtiest epithets are hurled at the ethnic or religious “Other.”

Those with access to the Internet—many of them, one imagines, university graduates—frequently promulgate ideas that members of other ethnic groups are sinister and diabolical, in short as the very incarnations of evil. 

In like fashion, these Internet partisans often make sweeping ethical claims for those who belong to their states, ethnicity, or religion.

Whether they denounce or extol whole groups, such claims are caricaturist in nature. They have little or no validity, even when they appear persuasive or seductive. 

We should recognise them as inimical to cultivating a broad base of enlightened society. I have argued elsewhere that ethnic baiting and stigmatisation often precede genocidal horrors. 

The free circulation of ideas of the inherent villainy of members of other ethnic groups and the inherent moral goodness of members of one’s ethnic collectivity is a clear and present danger. 

Those who champion such attitudes are reluctant to subject their positions to self-scrutiny. They seldom pause to interrogate the legitimacy of their notions of collective guilt and collective heroism. Without any form of examination, ethics is collapsed to the size and shape of ethnicity.

The rampancy and growing appeal of such wholesale creeds have fed the argument that the Gambia ought not to remain one country. That contention is outside the purview of my write-up, except in one respect. 

It is this: If the Gambia is ever to have a chance at self-realization, then its enlightened citizens must strike alliances across ethnic, religious, and social lines. A critical core of citizens must begin to look beyond ethnic and religious considerations when facing issues that behoove us to take principled positions.

I am Fula by birth, but I make no extraordinary claims for my ethnicity. There are admirable Fula men and women and deplorable Fula men and women. The same is true, I believe, for members of the Gambia’s other myriad ethnicities. 

I make a point of judging Fula politicians and public officials by the same criteria I use to evaluate politicians and public officials who happen, say, to be Serer, Jola, or Sarahule. 

I admire people who share my values, whatever their ethnic or religious identity. I believe, quite simply and unapologetically, in the ethnicity of values.

The blind cannot lead the sighted, and the uninformed cannot show the wise; the unskilled cannot direct the skilled. 

Furthermore, those that are deaf cannot define sound. As with everywhere in the world, the current structures rarely reward merit. 

So, those running the center for our youth are squandering not only trust but the potential of those they mismanaged. They are not wasting opportunities but the future of our nation.

By Alagi Yorro Jallow