Bon Appétit

 

We have been in The Gambia for nearly two months enjoying, at this latitude in The Sahel, the moderate temperatures of the Harmattan season. Apart from the dust that occasionally blows over, being here is a pleasant alternative to the snow and deep freeze that currently blanket most regions of Canada.

Well, the dust. Not unusual in The Gambia, of course, but this time round, it has been made worse by work on the Bertil-Harding, the highway that links the country’s international airport to its capital Banjul. This is a huge project, that is 25% funded by OPEC. It is not clear who funds the majority 75%, but there is always a quid pro quo, one of which, rumours say, stipulates the cessation of production of alcoholic beverages in the country. Whether or not that is true, one can no longer enjoy a long glass of JulBrew, a prize-winning lager that used to be produced in the country to one of the highest standards of taste. But not to worry, there are lots of other beers in the market that survive, perhaps because other agreements, bi-lateral or otherwise, protect the free-market movement of this class of product.  So, there is little reason to grumble.

The availability or otherwise of beer in the country is the least of its problems. Like one former US president famously declared, “It is the economy, stupid”. I don’t have access to any statistical indicators, but one just has to look around to see the masses of idle youth not engaged in any kind of productive work. Even for school-age children, it is distressing to see that they are out and about, during normal school hours, hawking pitifully meagre quantities of fruits and vegetables, which is an embarrassment to even consider buying. In relation to that, one might ask, is there free primary and secondary education in The Gambia? If so, why do these children, and their parents, not take advantage of it?

Youth (males) above school age are mostly involved in the taxi business, which seems to dominate, with pesky yellow cabs darting about all over the place, tying themselves, and others, in knots, especially at intersections where no rules of the road seem to apply. Interestingly, I was informed that drivers do not have to take a qualifying test in order to be granted a licence to drive, which I find difficult to believe, but seeing the antics of the Gambian driver, there might very well be a kernel of truth in this curious urban legend.

It may seem too, that this is the place where cars come to die, an impression one gains from the numerous open lots where moribund vehicles seem to gather. At the other extreme though, one sees spanking new, high-end vehicles, typically SUVs, assertively plying the roads. The mind boggles regarding their provenance, wherein it may be unwise to probe.

Apart from the transportation and allied fields, there is other commerce entailing, at various levels, buying and selling, including in supermarkets which, to me, seem to be largely in the hands of foreigners. And there is the foreign exchange and money transfer business, too. Scores of them along a stretch of the soon-to-be completed re-fashioned highway. And, as well, forex outlets crowd into every other nook and cranny, their storefronts awash with notices advertising what they do, including handling remittances from overseas. 

Funds from overseas. This is a big part of the economy, as it is in many other developing countries. I have no idea of how many hundreds of millions of foreign currency funds get into the Gambia, but an unhappy collateral of this inward flow is the powerful driver that propels Gambian youth to seek their fortunes abroad. Seeing how your friends and relatives send in money to support family, induces Gambian youth to believe that they, too, can make it overseas and perhaps send money to support their struggling families. If Joe Bloggs can do it, why not they? So, they attempt to get to Europe by the “Back Way”, as it is called here, the route across the Sahara to North Africa, and from there, hopefully, across the Mediterranean to southern Europe and beyond. Sadly, many of them perish in the desert sands, or drown in the Mediterranean or, for those who attempt the ocean route, in the waters of the Atlantic. Others, we are told, end up in slave camps in Libya - a lawless place - held to ransom by human traffickers to whom they might owe money. Sad.

One sector of the Gambian economy that remains buoyant is the tourism industry, which I am informed, employs 70,000. A huge figure, but how does that stand against the mass of the employable population seeking jobs? I can’t tell, but tour operators, hotels, guest houses, restaurants, taxi operators seem to be doing well, at least on the surface. Of course, there are the seedier aspects of the industry about which it would be impolite to comment, but every industry has its highs and its lows. Listening to the radio, though, one hears young entrepreneurs talk enthusiastically about their start-ups, and one can’t help being caught up in their passion. There is hope.

Another hopeful segment of the economy is the construction business, of which the highway re-fashioning I mentioned at the beginning is a notable example. There are many other projects that are active and geared to the needs of the tourism industry and which, in time, will contribute further to that sector. However, there are projects that have stalled, standing as a stark rebuke to excessive ambition. There are completed projects in spades (sorry), however, but the results don’t often add to the tranquility of the landscape. It is a matter of taste, I know.

Politics and government appear serene and safe, in contrast to the bad old days when Yahya Jammeh bestrode the land. At least, one does not hear of disappearances and/or early morning visits from the Junglers, the group that used to terrorize the nation, or of disappearances and/or torture in the notorious Mile Two facilities located just outside the capital, Banjul. One follow-up of those grim days that is currently playing out, is a trial going on in Switzerland, of Ousman Sonko who was, for a decade, Gambia’s Interior Minister, and allegedly, Yahya Jammeh’s enforcer. The trial is going ahead, without the government of The Gambia having any standing in the court, a matter of regret for some commentators.

What Gambians have been obsessing about at present though, is the AFCON tournament that is currently taking place in Cote d’Ivoire, in which the national team, The Scorpions, is taking part. As I write, the country is holding its collective breath to see whether the Scorpions can survive to beyond the group stage. Unfortunately, the internet (or my portion of it) is down and I cannot take part in this moment of national anxiety, as the Scorpions face Cameroon’s mighty Indomitable Lions.   

About the internet service where we stay, the least said the better. This is not the first time that it has failed, but the worst, so far, has been over the New Year celebrations period, when it went down for four days, beginning on Sunday the 31^st December, lasting till Wednesday the 3^rd of January. Apart from the emotional toll of that denial of service of not being able to wish family and friends happy new year and all that, there was, as well, financial costs of not being able to conclude some business before 2023 was out.

One cannot comment on The Gambia without mentioning food. Apart from Gambia cuisine, there is a wide assortment of international cuisine to delect, and I took full advantage of the entire range. There is always the temptation to compare West African cuisines, but I will resist that one until I have refreshed the memory of Sierra Leonean cooking, which I anticipate doing presently.

Meanwhile, Bon Appétit.

Tell Fren Tru

Postscript: Scorpions were no match for Lions.

 

 

 

 

A Pox On Them

 

Timing, they say, is everything. Tamba M'bayo, a professor in the Department of History at the University of West Virginia, Morgan Town, WV, United States arrived in Freetown in the fall of 2019 to research, of all things, the history of epidemics in Sierra Leone. The visit incidentally provided him with the opportunity for a bird’s-eye observation on how the Covid-19 pandemic would unfold in the country, as well as how the government would respond to the looming challenge. It was also an opportunity to compare and contrast Covid-19’s progression with that of previous epidemics which were, in the first place, the object of the professor’s intended year as a Fulbright Scholar.

The slow advance of Covid, and its apparent reduced lethality in Sierra Leone has been a surprise to many, as it was in the case for most of the Continent in general. Potential explanations include innate and/or acquired immunity, and/or minimal exposure of the community to the virus. The latter explanation is probably not sustainable because, where antibody studies have been done elsewhere in Africa, for example in Kenya and Malawi, there was evidence of Covid-19 infection in those communities, communities that are not dissimilar in the dynamics of life that obtain in Sierra Leone’s impoverished places.

So, how to explain the protective circumstances of being African and living in Africa? I do make the point of being African and living in Africa because we can contrast the lethality of Covid on individuals of African ancestry living in America, New York, say, with that of Africans living on their own continent. The high death rates among African Americans was one of the starker images, as the pandemic cut its way across the world, and which evoked tropes that, to some, confirmed that, in America, Black lives did not matter. But that is another story.

Anyway, America’s Covid experience leads us to the colonial designation of Sierra Leone as the ‘White Man’s Grave’. We have come a long way since White men, and women too, embarked, in their hundreds, and even thousands, on their civilizing enterprise in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. (Before that, of course, Africa was just the source of unpaid human sweat and sinew, as well as the victim of theft of its intellectual property of rice- and cotton-growing skills). Today, looking through the long glass of decades of clinical insights and research, we now have some idea of how these European adventurers met their untimely deaths: They were just not biologically prepared for living in those places. In the case of malaria, for example, we now know that there are numerous ways in which, being African, born and bred in those climes, means that one may be partially protected against the lethality of the parasitic infection through a network of inherited biological devices. Among these, the best known is the sickle gene which, when inherited from one parent only, provides protection against one of the more deadly malaria species. There are, as well, several other genes that shore up protection against this infection, but these as are not as well-known among the general public. In any event, once the individual has survived infancy, parasite infestation results in a low-grade illness that does not usually result in death.

In the case of yellow fever on the other hand, this infection, also mosquito-borne, comes in epidemic waves that either kills within a few days or a week, or if the victim survives, confers lifelong immunity against future waves of the virus.

But, for the missionary, or colonial official, walking off the boat, totally biologically naive, never mind culturally unprepared, and armed with defences no more robust than biblical text or that in his orders from the Colonial Office, it was almost a certainty that things would not end well. They and the colleagues that replaced them did not stand a chance, as the old burial grounds around Freetown attest. Many died within weeks of landing, whilst others struggled on for a few months and then gave up, dying on the voyage back home, with a sea burial to mark their passing.

Smallpox’s is another story, that of a virus with an altogether different level of virulence but which, in the end, turned out to be central to an understanding of the phenomenon of vaccination that became a model of how to prevent many infectious diseases. The term, ‘vaccination’ itself, has its roots in the observation that individuals who milked cows infected with cowpox enjoyed protection when an epidemic erupted.

Back to Covid-19. Age, genetics, prior exposure, all play a part in an individual’s response to any infective agent. According to the online Worldometer statistics site, Covid cases in Sierra Leone during the entire course of the pandemic, so far, number just 7766. Seven thousand, seven hundred! And just 126 deaths!! Some speculate that resistance to Covid and its lethality may be dependent on the country’s population age structure, in which case, Sierra Leone, a country with one of the youngest populations (median age of 19.1 years), is likely to be a beneficiary of this age-dependent protection. The jury is still out on that.

The other side of this equation is that this young, robust, and vibrant Sierra Leone population should be up to any challenge. Pity is that the governing class has not seen it fit to mobilize this raw energy that is just waiting to burst forth and flourish all over the place. Instead, they use/manipulate it to achieve their notoriously venal purposes. And, alas, they succeed. Cycle after cycle. A pox on them, I say, not to coin a phrase.

Anyway, pandemics, and epidemics, have their own logic. They come and they go, starting somewhere, from something, from someone. Tamba M’bayo referenced the 1918-22 influenza epidemic that was brought to Sierra Leone on board a British Navy vessel, the HMS Mantua, and Covid-19 has become a textbook case of how pandemics spread, in its case, using modern transportation systems.

Although, in the end, Covid has been tamed by modern science, it is still a wild beast out there, full of tricks and devices, and ever ready to up its game. Scientists are happy to engage.

‘Nuff said.

Tell Fren Tru