By Danielle E. Gaines [email protected]
With an empty belly in a crowded Gambian jail cell, Fanta Jawara had moments — during sleepless nights and sweltering days — when she worried she wouldn’t survive.
The 46-year-old mother of two teenage girls from Frederick is a naturalized U.S. citizen. She returned to her country of birth for a three-week vacation last year. But during a tumultuous time in Gambia’s political history, she was caught up near a march led by her uncle, beaten, jailed and sentenced to three years in the country’s notorious Mile 2 prison. On the first night after her arrest, Jawara’s surroundings were almost unbelievable.
“The environment was not the environment that I was expecting. Yes. It’s a prison, but it’s a very terrible environment,” she said.
She was put in a cell, with murderers, drug dealers, “baby dumpers,” bad people.
In a space as large as Jawara’s Frederick living room, the women in Mile 2 slept two to a twin mattress, four women each clumped under a single mosquito net. The bare mattresses laid on the bare floors. Without floor space, their clothing and belongings hanged from bags attached to the ceiling and walls.
“It’s very small, congested,” Jawara said. “That night, I could not sleep.”
It was her first time sleeping under a mosquito net, she was squished with people she didn’t know — and she was next to the single, small, dank bathroom all of the women shared.
A barred window opening on the splotchy green-painted exterior wall of the cell offered little breeze during the hot, rainy season when Jawara was held, but the opening beckoned mice, snakes and frogs inside.
Jawara has lasting scars dotting her forearms where ants would bite her in her sleep.
There were other hazards.
She feared fights, or being snatched from bed in the middle of the night and taken to a separate facility where political prisoners were known to be tortured.
“That was ringing in my mind every night that I would be picked up and taken … to be tortured,” Jawara said. “I was praying to God: Let that not be me.”
The women were locked in at 5 p.m. And there they stayed until 8 a.m., breakfast time.
“The food? Forget it,” Jawara said, describing the balls of porridge cooked the day before and topped with new hot water the next morning. And even if the porridge was good, she’d seen cockroaches climb out of the flour bags, ensuring it would not go into her stomach.
“Honestly, I did not know that I would survive the eight months that I did,” Jawara said.
After months of diplomatic maneuvering, impassioned pleas by family members, and a final historic vote by the Gambian people that cemented her release, Jawara is home in Frederick now, healing mentally and physically.
As Gambians look to rebuild the country they lovingly call “the smiling coast of Africa,” Jawara and other former political prisoners in Gambia have started speaking about their ordeals.
How she got there
On April 16, near the nation’s capital and just down the street from her family’s home, Jawara was swept up and arrested as part of a crackdown against political protests.
Her uncle, Ousainou Darboe, a political opposition leader, was hosting a march down Kairaba Avenue — a major road that runs nearly to the ocean on one end and is a bustling business district near the Darboe family home, across from the American embassy.
Darboe and others were demanding the return of Gambian youth political activist Solo Sandeng, who was tortured to death after a demonstration demanding electoral reform ahead of the country’s 2016 election.
A coalition of political parties banded together last year in opposition to the 22-year authoritarian rule of former President Yahya Jammeh. Jammeh assumed power in a bloodless 1994 coup that deposed Dawda Jawara, the grandfather of Fanta’s husband, Ebrima. The elder Jawara had served as the country’s first president since 1970, when Gambians won independence from the United Kingdom.
Jammeh ruled the country as a dictator, cracking down on civil servants, the media and political opponents through forced disappearances, torture and worse, according to Human Rights Watch.
On the day of the march, Fanta Jawara was on Kairaba Avenue at the same time as marchers, headed to the bank with fresh braids in her hair as she prepared for her trip back to the United States two days later. She was not marching, she said.
About a half-mile down the road from Darboe’s home, police units joined the marcher’s ranks from behind, and soon there was a barricade up front.
Cellphone videos show flashes of chaos after that. Gunshots and crying can be heard in the streets. Limbs of protesters and the batons of police can be seen flailing.
Jawara was caught up in it all.
“I was slapped. I was kicked. I was tortured,” she said. “… I was soaked in blood. Blood all over. My blood and other people’s.”
Jawara could not see out of her left eye and she feared she would lose it. Her head throbbed. She’d been dragged by her braids and remembers seeing strands of them on the ground. A large section of skin was torn off her left thigh.
“Some of the pain you don’t even notice. You just see the blood. You don’t know where the pain is coming from,” she said.
She saw her uncle — who she calls “Dad” — at the police building where they were both held for one night.
“He looked at me and said ‘What are you doing here? Didn’t I ask you guys to stay home?’” Fanta remembers. “I said ‘I was not a part of this. I went to pick up money and I got arrested on the way home.’”
Darboe’s head was split open and his shoulder was dislocated.
The next morning, the group of prisoners was led to a big truck.
“I said, ‘Dad, where are they taking us?’” Fanta remembered.
He said, “I don’t know. I don’t know where they are taking us.”
How she survived
Jawara would spend a total of 233 days in custody, and 231 nights at Mile 2, the country’s central prison.
The days were monotonous.
In the run-up to Gambia’s presidential election, the prison’s televisions and radios were taken away. Guards were not permitted to bring their cellphones to work. There was little news from the outside world.
“Sometimes you even lose track of time and day,” Jawara said. “You get up in the morning, all you have to do is sit in one place.”
There was a courtyard, but Jawara could reach both sides of the narrow space with her arms and the walls were so tall, you could not see the tops of the trees — just blank sky overhead. There was no air, as if a Tupperware cover were over the top of the walls.
As her wounds began to heal, Jawara would look to help others. To tamp down fights during the 15 hours when prisoners were locked in their cells overnight, Jawara started a physical activity program.
“It was a total body workout,” but it was too tiring for many women without proper nutrition, Jawara said.
She and the inmates also engaged in a nightly “talk show,” dreaming up topics that even included cooking segments, when they would call out local Gambian dishes and talk about how to cook them.
Jawara, who worked at Physicians Surgery Center of Fredrick before she left for Gambia, said her nursing background helped her to try to maintain her health and that of other inmates too.
Women went to the infirmary for medical issues and often returned with the same pain pills they’d already been prescribed or with a medication that had nothing to do do with their ailments, Jawara said.
“They were like overdosing themselves on pain pills,” Jawara said. She had women bring her their full supplies of medications and she taught them how to properly take the medicine.
How she was freed
Jawara was arrested in April and sentenced in July to three years in prison.
The judge concluded that Jawara did not appear to be a part of the protest, but she also refused to give a defense in court and was therefore found guilty, according to documents forwarded by her husband, Ebrima.
As Jawara and others idled in prison cells, the country stewed as voters pushed for Jammeh’s ouster.
Election Day was tense in the prison.
When the morning crew arrived the next day, the prisoners asked: “How are things?”
“We don’t know,” came the response.
That was a clue that Jammeh was not winning, according to the women who were in Mile 2 during the last election.
On Saturday morning, the officers came and called out the political prisoners.
“Get ready and stand by,” Jawara recalled.
“Stand by for what?” she asked.
“Oh, you guys are going home,” came the response. “… You guys got what you wanted. Yahya Jammeh lost.”
On Monday, the political prisoners went to court. Jawara wore a bright turquoise dress and headscarf her sister brought to the prison.
She was released on bail shortly before Jammeh declared that he would not leave power or the country.
After a tense month, Jammeh left Gambia on Jan. 21 and coalition candidate Adama Barrow freely assumed power.
Barrow’s inauguration was set for Feb. 18, Independence Day.
Feb. 18 represented a moment of independence for Jawara, too: she and other political prisoners were freed from their “criminal” pasts with presidential pardons.
She recalled joy in the streets.
“People were free … They gained their liberty back, their freedom. All of that came back,” Jawara said. “Because they were quiet for 22 years. They could not open their mouth. Walking in the streets, I thought, ‘Man, this country is back. Gambia is back.’”
Soon, Jawara would be on a flight home to see her daughters in person for the first time in nearly a year.
“It is the vote of the Gambian people and the support of people and their efforts around the world that stood up for us, for our release. That’s what got us out,” Jawara said.
What she looks forward to
Before she left Gambia, Fanta and Ebrima Jawara went to the prison to bring back medicine and brooms for the women who were still inside. Brooms, because the prisoners had to use the same unsanitary broom to clean the outdoors, bathroom and cell.
She hopes other prison reforms will come to Gambia.
Gambia’s new interior minister recently toured Mile 2 and said the conditions will no longer be tolerated.
“Prisoners are human beings, too, so they should be treated humanely,” Minister Mai Ahmad Fatty said on the prison grounds last month.
Jawara is monitoring her uncle’s health through news reports. After the election and his release, Darboe became the country’s foreign minister.
She is still going to doctor’s appointments herself. When she returned, Jawara learned that she had a ruptured membrane in her ear. She also still has tenderness under her eyes and strong headaches.
“I’m not yet back to my routine. But I think I’m working towards that. It’s getting nice outside, so I need to get up and start,” she said.
For now, Jawara is enjoying simple comforts of home: taking a shower where she can regulate the temperature of the water, boiling a kettle of tea when she wants. She is considering writing a book.
Jawara recently shared her story with Fatou Camara, a Gambian radio and television personality who was forced out of the country and her former job as Jammeh’s press secretary after a falling-out. Camara, who runs a Gambian-focused news operation from the U.S., served time at The National Intelligence Agency (NIA) before fleeing Gambia while released on bail.
“It was a very terrible experience,” Camara said. She dealt by doing interviews with anyone who asked and starting her radio show.
“I talked it out,” Camara said. She’s moving back to Gambia in June, eager to see the country rebuild its spirit.
“Sometimes I say we need nationwide therapy. Because we’ve all been traumatized. I saw torture myself when I was arrested. And people have family members who were snatched at night, they never come back home,” Camara said.
She said a recently established Truth and Reconciliation Commission will help the country heal, even as new mass graves are being discovered.
William Cecil Roberts, an anthropology professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has worked in Gambia since he served as a Peace Corps volunteer there in the early 1980s.
Roberts said one thing Gambia has going for it during this time of political transition is its small size, because Gambians generally see themselves as related and very close. The country is slightly less than twice the size of Delaware, with about 2 million people.
Roberts said people around the world — and especially in the U.S. where Gambians were brought to the Annapolis City Dock as slaves — should be engaged in rebuilding efforts.
“If we really think that history matters and that what our forebearers have done matters, we should do whatever we can to support the Gambians,” Roberts said.
As for Fanta, if you’d asked her while she was at Mile 2 if she’d ever go back to her birth country, she would have said no.
The family has a vacation home under construction in Sukuta, near the ocean; while in jail, she considered telling Ebrima to sell it.
“I said when I leave this country, I would never come back,” Jawara said.
Now she thinks she will return someday.
“I’m very, very hopeful that they will bring Gambia back,” she said.
