David Monnery - Gambian Bluff

Jabang laughed. ‘I could sleep for a week,’ he said, ‘but when will I get the chance?’

‘After you’ve addressed the Council,’ Taal said.

‘Just take a few hours. We’ll wake you if necessary.’

‘And when will you sleep?’ Jabang asked.

‘Whenever I can.’ But probably not for the rest of the day, he thought. Whatever. He should get his second wind soon.

The driver arrived with Sallah, who joined him in the front. The street seemed virtually empty, but that was not surprising. Today, Taal both hoped and expected, most people would stay home and listen to the radio.

‘I must talk to the Senegalese envoy after the Council,’ Jabang remembered out loud. ‘Where is he at the moment?’

‘In the house where he is staying,’ Sallah said over his shoulder. ‘He has only been told he cannot go out.’

‘You will bring him to the Legislative Assembly?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ Jabang sat back as the taxi swung through the roundabout at McCarthy Square, his eyes darting this way and that as if searching for something to rest on.

Watching him, Taal felt a sudden sense of emptiness. He had known Mamadou Jabang for almost twenty-five years, since he was fourteen and the other man was seven. They had grown up in adjoining houses in Bakau, both sons of families well off by Gambian standards. Both had flirted with the religious vocation, both had been educated abroad, though on different sides of the Iron Curtain.

Taal had graduated from Sandhurst in England, while Jabang had received one of the many scholarships offered by Soviet embassies in Africa during the early 1970s. The former had worked his way effortlessly to his position in the Field Force, and only Jawara’s unspoken but justified suspicion of Taal’s political sympathies had prevented him holding the top job before he was forty.

Jabang, on the other hand, had become mired in politics, and had foolishly – as he himself admitted – allowed himself to overestimate Jawara’s instinct for self-preservation. The SRLP had become too popular too quickly, particularly among the township youths and the younger members of the Field Force, and in the early summer of 1980 Jawara had seized on the random shooting of a policeman to ban the Party. With all the democratic channels closed, the SRLP had spent the succeeding year planning Jawara’s overthrow by force.

And here they were, driving to the parliament building behind a pair of pink furry dice, the new leaders of their country, at least for today. Taal felt the enormity of it all – like burning bridges, as the English would say. If the Council could endure, then he and Mamadou would have the chance to transform their country, to do all the things they had dreamed of doing, to truly make a difference in the lives of their countrymen. If they failed, then Jawara would have them hanged.

The stakes could hardly be higher.

‘Junaidi, we’ve arrived,’ Jabang said, pulling him out of his reverie. Mamadou had a smile on his face – the first one Taal had seen that day. And why not, he thought, climbing out of the taxi in the forecourt of the Legislative Assembly. They had succeeded. For the moment at least, they had succeeded.

He followed Jabang in through the outer doors, across the anteroom and into the chamber, where the forty or fifty men who had been waiting for them burst into spontaneous applause.

Jabang raised a fist in salute, beamed at the assembly, and took a seat on the platform. Taal sat beside him and looked out across the faces, every one of which he knew. He had the sudden sinking feeling that this would be the high point, and that from this moment on things would only get worse.

Jabang was now on his feet, motioning for silence. ‘Comrades,’ he began, ‘I will not take up much of your time – we all have duties to perform,’ adding with a smile: ‘And a country to run. I can tell you that we are in firm control of Banjul, Bakau, Fajara, Serekunda, Yundum and Soma. Three-quarters of the Field Force has joined us. I do not think we have anything to fear from inside the country. The main threat, as we all knew from the beginning, will come from outside, from the Senegalese. They have the treaty with Jawara, and if they judge it in their interests to uphold it then it is possible they will send troops. I still think it more likely that they will wait to judge the situation here, and act accordingly.

‘So it is important that we offer no provocations, no excuse for intervention. At the moment we have no news of their intentions, but I will be asking their envoy here to talk to his government in Dakar this morning. And of course we shall be making the most of the friends we have in the international community.

‘The Senegalese will not act without French approval, so we must also make sure that nothing tarnishes our image in the West. The last thing we need now is a dead white tourist.’ He grinned owlishly.

‘The Council will be in more or less permanent session from now on – and when any of us will get any sleep is anyone’s guess. All security matters should be channelled through Junaidi here.’

Taal smiled at them all, reflecting that it was going to be a long day.

The British High Commission was situated on the road between Bakau and Fajara, some eight miles to the west of Banjul. McGrath finally got through on the phone around ten o’clock. The line had been jammed for the previous two hours, presumably with holiday-makers wondering what the British Government intended to do about the situation. As if there was anything they could do.

He asked to talk to Bill Myers, the all-purpose undersecretary whose roles included that of military attaché. Myers had helped smooth the path for McGrath on the ex-SAS man’s arrival, and they had met several times since, mostly at gatherings of the expatriate community: Danes running an agricultural research station, Germans working on a solar-energy project, Brits like McGrath involved in infrastructural improvements. It was a small community, and depressingly male.

‘Where are you?’ was Myers’s first question.

‘At the Atlantic’

‘How are things there? No panic?’

‘Well, there was one outbreak when someone claimed the hotel was running out of gin…’

‘Ha ha…’

‘No, no problems here. People are just vaguely pissed off that they can’t go out. Not that many of them wanted to anyway, but they liked the idea that they could.’

Myers grunted. ‘What about the town? Any idea what’s going on?’

‘Hey, I called you to find out what was going on – not the other way round.’

‘Stuck out here we haven’t got a clue,’ Myers said equably. ‘There seems to be a group of armed men outside each of the main hotels, but there haven’t been any incidents involving Europeans that we know of. There was some gunfire in Bakau last night, but we’ve no idea who got shot. And we listened to Chummy on the radio this morning. And that’s about it. What about you?’

McGrath told him what he had heard and seen from the Carlton roof, and at the hospital. ‘It seems quiet enough for now,’ he concluded. ‘Looks like they made it stick, at least for the moment.’

‘If you can find out anymore, we’d appreciate it,’ Myers said. ‘It’s hard to give London any advice when we don’t know any more than they do.’

‘Right,’ McGrath agreed. ‘In exchange, can you let my wife know I’m OK?’

Myers took down the London number. ‘But don’t go taking any mad risks,’ he said. ‘I’m not taking a day trip to Banjul, not even for your funeral.’

‘You’re all heart,’ McGrath said, and hung up. For a moment he stood in the hotel lobby, wondering what to do. The new government had only restricted the movement of ‘guests’, by which they presumably meant the three hundred or so lucky souls currently visiting The Gambia on package holidays. McGrath was not on holiday and not a guest, so the restrictions could hardly apply to him.