Amie Cham; The Miracle Cures

Recently, on National Television, the President spoke about his latest cure, this time for Infertility. "The white man gives you infertility pills, and then asks you to lie with your husband", he proclaimed, "but I will not tell you this when I give you my medicine". He did not give further details, or explain exactly how his medicine would achieve what was previously thought impossible, and allow a human female to conceive asexually. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), 1500 women showed up for the infertility treatment, and half this number were checked into the program.

The other day during my daily perusal of the Gambian news websites, I came across a story about a fund-raising dinner for the "Foundation for the cure of AIDS and other Uncurable [sic] diseases" (a name which seems suspiciously to have been thought up by someone with at least a sense of irony). Prices for tables at this dinner were in the tens of thousands of dalasi range, and the money raised was to be used for logistical and other support for the foundation, including the making of documentaries preserving this most “historical” occurrence of our times.

All over the country, people have rushed to defend the Presidential cures, calling anyone outside the country who dared to speak up against them everything from “jealous” [the Senegalese Scientific community, who sent out a communiqué last year calling the cures bogus, and saying there was no scientific evidence in support of them], to “scared” [the drug companies, who apparently are “scared” because our President’s free cures will eat into their lucrative anti-retroviral drug market], to even “racist” [because, or so the argument goes, the President’s good work is not being recognized only because he is not white]. Everyone knows by now about the UNDP rep who got kicked out of the country for speaking up in public against the harmful effects of a “false” AIDS cure, especially coming from the Government [the next day there was a blistering editorial in the “Daily Observer” (the government paper) calling her a failure and saying she had not benefited the country in any way during her term, “unlike her predecessor”]. What people outside the country wonder is (to put it bluntly): "how could they all be so stupid?" For a while after the CNN report, which pretty much portrayed Gambians as a bunch of poor, impoverished, illiterate set of people ruled by an insane dictator, whenever I got into a conversation with someone on the train, and told them I was from the Gambia, the first thing they said was: "oh - your President's the one who cures AIDS, right?", with the kind of smile we usually reserve for when we talk about crackpots and other similar species of people. I would smile stiffly, and try to change the topic as soon as possible.

It is often easy when we are outside looking in to pare down things to a set of choices, on one side a “right” choice (“the truth”), and on the other a “wrong” one (“evil”). So with the President’s AIDS and other cures: everything about them points to the fact that they are in fact not real cures, from their purported dream-source to the way they can only be administered on certain days, to the way painstaking efforts are made not to share data and results from the cures with any outside, unbiased party. Thus, from the outside it looks to be a clear-cut case: here is a President who is using his position to deceive people into believing he has magical healing powers. Surely any educated man with a conscience would stand up against this nonsense, or at least not be seen supporting it – ergo, all the people who support the cure are either criminally stupid, or willfully malicious (i.e. evil).

Now this might be perfectly acceptable reasoning from a non-Gambian who has never lived in the country, but for someone like me, who spent some 30 years there before I came to the US, living and working and being a part of the country come rain or the unbearable heat of the sun, I would be doing my country a dis-service to take the simple way out. Surely, I thought, there was an explanation for why the cures had been accepted so readily and with no public opposition (there’s lots of opposition to them alright – only they remain private, for reasons we shall get to) beside “all Gambians are stupid”.

This weekend I read a beautiful science fiction story, in which a boy (seven years old, if I remember correctly) possesses a fantastic and terrible power: he can think anything, and it will happen. Any situation, no matter how outlandish, he only has to imagine and concentrate on, and instantly it will come to pass. We are not told how he comes to possess this power - he was apparently born with it. But the people in the small town in which he lives live in terror of him, going around with fixed smiles on their faces, in case they should annoy him, never, ever, complaining about anything, because they have learnt from bitter experience that the little boy likes "helping" people, and that these attempts at kindness almost always end in total disaster. And to make it worse, the little boy also reads minds, so you don’t even have to voice them to make him know your desires. Once, in desperation, a cadre of the towns-people tried to sneak up on him and end their troubles once and for all - that very same day there was a new set of graves in the town graveyard. At the time the story takes place, everyone has given up, and are living their lives around the little boy, around his likes and dislikes, his whims (however ridiculous they seem), trying as hard as they can to please him and not get in his way.

This afternoon after work, on my way up to my apartment, standing in the elevator opposite a Filipino man, I suddenly understood why the story had resonated so strongly with me when I had read it.

You see, what most people outside of the country do not understand is that it does not matter whether our President can or cannot cure AIDS and "other uncurable diseases", it does not matter whether it is true that people treated have died (and there have been resulting cover-ups). The majority of people I have spoken to in the country (including even strong Government supporters) have never believed that the President had a dream in which his great-great-grandfather told him how to cure diseases, for the benefit of humanity, whilst cautioning him to do so only on Thursdays and Fridays, any more than they believe that the Gambia is "a superpower", or that "we will wipe any country that stands against us off the world map" (both claims the President has made in speeches). Oh, there are people who believe alright: 1500 people turned up for the infertility cure alone, when it was announced on national radio, and there were large numbers for the AIDS and Asthma cures. Religious and traditional practises are still a big part of Gambian society, and the President uses both in his "cures": wielding a copy of the Quran, and claiming the concoction he rubs on patient's bodies is of herbal origin. Also there is the fact that the patients being cured get to live in a nice suite of apartments during the period of treatment, dining well, not doing any work, and generally making a holiday of it. (A doctor friend of mine currently living in the Gambia believes this is the reason for the “improvements” in the patients shown on national TV (they are shown limping and looking pale and emaciated when they come in, but by the end of the program they have gained weight, they are laughing and happy, jumping around and dancing and singing words of praise), that they are not cured, it is only that the temporary positive changes in their living conditions and diet has led to a few surface improvements).

But the people who actually make decisions, the ones in positions of power - none of these people actually believes the President's claims. At which point you throw away this essay in disgust, because as we all know these are the same people who swear on TV that the President is the greatest healer God ever sent to mankind, and publish messages in the Observer congratulating the President on "his great achievements in the world of medical science" (the most notorious of these, the (now former) Minister of Health Dr Mbowe, he of the CNN interview, has on several occasions staked his “western medical certificates” on the veracity of the cure). These are the same people who buy out diamond tables (the most expensive) when the Foundation for the cure of, etc. organizes gala dinners at five-star hotels.

When you work for a Government that insists that civil servants (especially the ones higher up) are also party supporters, there must of necessity be a split between your public and private personas. In public, in order not to lose your job and/or be sent to jail on charges of “economic crimes” (both things that have happened too many times to mention, in the past few years), your every action and every word must fall in line with official party policy/rhetoric. This is how Government and the political system have always worked in the Gambia ("always" here meaning the relatively small amount of time since Independence, during which we have had only two Presidents, which in my opinion is a great cause of hope, since it means as a state we are still young, and there is the expectation that with age we will mature, and things will get better): the story is told how when President Jawara, during his term as President, decided to resign, a committee of Ministers, civil servants, and "ordinary citizens" went to see him, to plead that he stay, because the country needed him still. They cried and begged, and prostrated themselves on the ground, and he graciously changed his mind (the voice of the people and all that), staying in power until he was finally removed by the coup in '94.

If one were to conduct a poll to find the most frequently used phrase in the media, I have a suspicion that it would be “visionary leader”. Every time someone gives a speech, from the lowliest political aspirants to the highest civil servants, this phrase pops up its head somewhere, perhaps at the beginning, claiming “none of this could have been done without the support of our visionary leader”, perhaps at the end, thanking “our visionary leader for his visionary leadership”. Quite apart from the Gambian’s love of cliché (“in a nutshell”, “all protocols respectfully observed”, “the bottom line is” – all things you can’t watch GRTS for more than an hour without hearing at least a few times), there is a central vein that runs through all these speeches, and indeed the majority of speeches given within the country, a vein of sycophancy and continual attempts to ingratiate oneself with the President. Just the other day, in one of the online Gambian newspapers, I read about an 80-year old man who was waking everyday at 5am to sweep away the sand on the roads near his house. “Why do you do it?”, the reporter asked him. “Because”, the old man replied, “the President wants cleanliness in the nation, and instead of giving it to him once a week I thought it would be better to do it everyday. And the sand can cause accidents”, he added, almost as an afterthought. [The last Saturday of every month is declared a “cleaning” day, with all the roads closed until 1pm, and everyone required to come out and clean their environments].

People take every chance they get to praise the President, and the “good things” he is doing for the country. When the AIDS cure was announced on national TV, the first thought that came to these people’s minds was not whether it was true or not, or “scientific” or not. The first thought that came to their minds was just how this could be used to win more points (think of the whole system as a game, in which you win or lose points based on the President (who is the final arbiter)’s moods. These are not your monopoly points: they can determine whether you become extremely rich, or get sacked and spend the next five years being transported to and from prison and paying a fortune in legal fees to your lawyer to defend you against charges brought up against you by the state). When they took out sections in the papers, and appeared on national TV and radio vehemently defending the President, they were not doing so because of any belief they have in his magical/medical abilities. They were defending him because, like the spoilt little boy in the science fiction story, the President’s word is law in my country. And, unlike the townspeople in the story, Gambians actually want to use the President’s powers to their personal advantage (which is one of the reasons his powers have persisted for so long, unconstitutional as they are): they will put up with him making ludicrous claims, they will let him get away with massive abuse of his Presidential position, they will stand and watch whilst he dips his hand into the national treasury and uses the money for his own personal enrichment – they will do all this because there is a chance – however small - that they will get to share in the booty. [And booty there is, aplenty: the President is very generous to his friends – once you’re in, everything follows: the cars, the mansions, the large bank accounts, the extremely lucrative higher-up Government positions]

And this is the much bigger (not to mention scarier) problem, the one which is the reason something like the current AIDs debacle can even happen: the fact that Government and the houses of parliament are full of people who at the slightest notice will fling themselves to the ground and fawn and grovel and lie through their teeth, in order to secure their positions and perhaps get better ones; that this is not only completely acceptable, but in fact expected of civil servants; and that this situation is steadily growing worse and worse, depositing more and more power in the President’s lap and letting him get away with ever wilder things.

The AIDs scandal will pass, perhaps soon, perhaps when Jammeh, too, passes, when his reign comes to an end. And after him, there will come another President – let us call him Krubally . Krubally, too, will be called a “visionary leader”, and asked to be President for life. All will hail him as the best President we have ever had, whilst he loots Government coffers and throws out envelopes of money at people on the street. One day Krubally will wake up and declare he can fly. Immediately the usual suspects will fall over each other in their rush to congratulate him, and declare that the country does not need any more birds, and that the Senegalese are jealous...

[Note: In the course of this article, I have been speaking in broad generalizations, mainly because it is a pain to keep saying “some Gambians, who are involved in the political system and therefore stand to gain most from it by being dishonest” instead of just “Gambians”, and you have perhaps taken this to mean that I mean “all Gambians”. This is certainly not the case: quite a large number of Gambians take no part in the system I have outlined above whatsoever, their only contribution being to vote every election (if even that – the level of voter apathy has been increasing in recent years).]

NYAMATOO SAYS:

“Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.” - Margaret Chase Smith