Before It Is Too Late: Constructing an Archive of Oral Sourcesand a National Museum in Independent Gambia

Bellagamba, Alice.

Africa Today, Volume 52, Number 4, Summer 2006, pp. 29-52 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

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Memory is a creative

process of interpretation.

An archive of oral sources

lives so far as research

guarantees its connection

with society at large and

groups’ and individuals’

attempts to keep the present

in touch with its past.

Before It Is Too Late: Constructing an Archive of Oral Sources and a National Museum in Independent GambiaAlice Bellagamba

This article discusses the cultural policy of the Republic of the Gambia in the aftermath of independence. It illustrates the establishment of an archive of oral sources and a national museum, considers the institutional and intellectual vision that inspired their creation, and comments on their relation-ships to internal political developments and external debates on the relevance of African sources for the reconstruction of African history. At the core of both initiatives was the idea of providing the emerging nation with a decolonized representation of its past, recovering the tangible and intan-gible expressions of the cultural and historical heritage of the Gambia River. The subsequent developments of the two institutions are analyzed, showing the declining interest for oral sources and the rise of “heritage politics,” determined more by the needs of promoting The Gambia in the tourist market than by an appreciation of the complexities and richness of the country’s cultural heritage.

In February 1965 in the whole of The Gambia, celebrations welcomed the end of colonial rule (Mbodj 1999; Rice 1967; Wright 1997). The country had just achieved self-government under the leadership of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), and complete independence from Great Britain would come in 1970. In 1971, the government created the Cultural Archives of the Gambia, a department to preserve and valorize the cultural and nation’s historical heritage; a few years later, it became the Oral and History Antiq-uities Division (OHAD). In an exercise of critical historical reconstruction, this article analyzes the developments of OHAD and its cultural agenda in the history of postcolonial Gambia, drawing evidence from public and pri-vate archives, testimonies, and conversations with participants in OHAD activities.

Constructing a national archive of oral sources was an objective pur-sued since independence. The archive was meant to store oral traditions and

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historical memories relating to the Gambia River and surrounding regions, with ethnographic information, genealogies of the major families, descrip-tions of ceremonies, and records of traditional customs. Presently, the notion of intangible heritage is on the stage, as oral traditions were during the late 1950s and 1960s when their discovery offered to historians access to an otherwise undocumented African past (Miller 1999; Vansina 1961, 1994). Within UNESCO, there is much discussion today about the necessity of safeguarding for the future the ephemeral dimensions of culture. Musi-cal performances, oral poetry, songs, ceremonies, and historical narratives are seen as fragile productions, which ought to have been classified and recorded as living historical monuments of human creativity.1

In the 1970s and 1980s, OHAD followed precisely this policy, sys-tematically collecting oral sources and testimonies before individuals who could tell about the precolonial and colonial past died. In the belief that the recordings would prove useful to the future development of the nation, personnel from OHAD recorded folktales, proverbs, and songs. In the mid-1980s, these efforts, and the collection of objects connected with them, led to the establishment of the National Museum of the Gambia, officially inaugurated during independence celebrations of February 1985. This was the second aspect of OHAD activities, briefly illustrated in the following pages.2

In the vision of this institution, the building up of the museum and the oral-sources archive were complementary activities: the former could not proceed without the latter—an innovative conception (Cruikshank 1992; Green 1998; Hamilton 2002), which, for lack of local financial means and technical skills, never resulted in any sophisticated exhibition. My argument develops in four sections: the first discusses the actions in the field of cultural preservation promoted during colonial times; the second illustrates the establishment of the cultural archive and its first achieve-ments; the third appraises the methodology of research used by OHAD and locates it within wider debates on the historical value of oral sources to reconstruct the past of African societies; and the fourth describes the national museum. The ethnographic display, dismantled in 2002, focused almost exclusively on provincial Gambia and its social and cultural life. An insistence on rural areas was both a consequence of political develop-ments within the country and a reflection of the ideology dominant among scholars of Africa and African intellectuals, one that saw in rural Africa the truest and richest repository of traditional knowledge and customs. In the conclusion, I trace the transformation of OHAD into the Research and Documentation Division, a section of the National Council for Arts and Culture, established by the government at the end of the 1980s as part of the Economic Recovery Programme, launched in 1985.3

A salvage paradigm, maintained James Clifford (1988), characterized the spirit of ethnography during most of the twentieth century. Ethnogra-phers saw themselves as fighting against time as they engaged in writing down “traditional cultures” before their disappearance under the pressures

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of modernization. The same ideal was appropriated by the cultural archive, and subsequently by OHAD. It served to legitimize the institutional role and the mission of both institutions, nationally and internationally. Most of the cultural heritage of the Gambia had been produced and transmitted in the oral domain, through narratives, songs, and oral traditions. In the vision of the officials responsible for OHAD, the decay of this patrimony was provoked by twentieth-century social and cultural changes and could be arrested only by systematically recording it and transforming it into written text.

Colonial Attitudes toward the History and Cultures of the Gambia River

In many African countries, the policy of preserving local cultures began in colonial times, with the collection and exhibition of traditional artifacts in growing urban centers, where they could be admired by the European elite, diplomats. and travelers, and by the emerging and educated African middle class (Ardouin and Arinze 2000; Ravenhill 1996). In Senegal, for instance, the collections now part of the Museum of Dakar were first assembled by scholars and colonial officials serving in French West Africa, in strict collaboration with the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris (Diaw 1994:7–11).

The establishment of the first museums was accompanied by an idealization of the customary style of life, represented as the timeless counterpart of modernity, a tribal world unspoiled by the innovations and temptations of urban centers. Disentangled from their original uses and meanings, objects helped construct an image of human history and its developments—an image that mirrored the imperial mentality of the time and its partition between civilized and primitive societies. National muse-ums in Africa received this legacy and adapted it to the nationalism and anticolonialism that predated and followed political independence. During the 1960s and 1970s, museums became places where the preservation and exhibition of relics from authentic and uncontaminated African cultures nurtured national pride. Curators of collections carefully minimized ethnic distinctions so as to strengthen feelings of belonging to a common socio-cultural and political space (Gauge 1997:196; Kaplan 1994).4

Compared with these early experiences, the Gambia exemplifies a quite different situation. The colonial government never pursued a sound policy to keep the cultural and historical heritage of the river alive, even when this heritage was strictly related to European presence and settle-ments, like the vestiges of the forts built during the centuries of the slave trade.5 The cultural and historical scenario of the river was complex and heterogeneous, linked to other areas of West Africa, the Sahara, Europe, and the Americas by trade and cultural exchanges.6 In the colonial mentality of the early twentieth century, local cultures lacked coherence and solid politi-cal institutions; they were a mixture of different influences, one culture

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borrowing from the other and escaping any attempt at neat classification. The Mandinka and the Wolof, with their hierarchical institutions, seemed to colonial officials more developed than the Fula and the Jola, describable instead as still attached to a tribal and primitive style of life.

The work of ethnographic documentation was subordinated to admin-istrative needs, a way of inscribing in local history and legitimizing policies and decisions that stemmed from the logic of the colonial state (Hawkins 2001; Spear 2003). Colonial officials wrote down oral traditions when they proved useful to sustain their decisions, along with compilations of customs and habits relating to the ethnic groups, by then labelled as tribes, living within the boundary of British rule. Genealogies of ruling families were collected to investigate the claims of rival factions to positions in the local structure of administration.7 To promote development in the late 1940s and 1950s, the government sponsored social research to assess the rural socio-economic conditions, and during this period, professional ethnographers and sociologists undertook fieldwork to systematize and enrich previous knowledge about the cultures and societies of the river (Gamble 2002:3).

The difficult living conditions of the protectorate (if compared to European standards of the time), the rotation of British officials serving in rural areas, and the idea that the Gambia was an initial step of a career (which, officials hoped, would develop in more prestigious areas of the empire) were among the reasons that explained the colonizers’ lack of interest in local cultures.

Most native artistic expressions—masquerades, songs, poetry, epics, and historical narratives—were located in rural areas and belonged to the domain of orality. In the compounds of district chiefs, prominent trad-ers, and interpreters, griots sang the epic traditions of Mali and of the Senegambia, tracing and praising the prestigious ancestry of local elites. They recalled the deeds of Sunjata Keita, founder of the ancient kingdom of Mali, and explained how his lieutenant, Tiramang Traoré, moved toward the Atlantic coast with a following of horsemen, artisans, and traders,8 how migrants from Mali married into the local society, and how the new politi-cal elite, strictly bound to the political traditions of Mali, came into being. Narratives mentioned the order in which villages had been established, the web of alliances between settlements, and the pattern of dominance and subjugation. The griots used musical instruments, like the balafongo (a set of small dried gourds, assembled as a multikeyed xylophone), the kontingo (a three-stringed lute), and the kora (a 24-stringed lute, with a resonator made out of a calabash), to play old tunes and compose new praise-songs for their colonial patrons. The following account of chiefs with their art-ists is drawn from the history of the Gambia written by Bella Sidney Woolf (Lady Bella Southorn), wife of a governor of the Colony and Protectorate of the Gambia. She looked at these cultural manifestations with a mixture of sympathy and contempt typical of the colonial mentality of the time: “in the case of the Chiefs[,] they have music wherever they go. Not only do the griots accompany the Chiefs in their districts upriver[,] but if a Mandingo

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Chief comes to Bathurst, the griots wait outside the shop or any other place he may visit and make melody” (Woolf 1952:247).

Dancing, drumming, singing, and the telling of folktales by the fire were other forms of rural entertainment. Masks showed up during festivities, and itinerant artists narrated well-known historical events to the public. These cultural productions were almost invisible to colonial officials, who, living in official quarters apart from local Gambians and their daily activities and being unable to speak the native languages flu-ently, considered the people simple and unsophisticated. Easily collectible material artifacts seemed unimpressive when compared with sculptures and carvings from elsewhere in Africa. The circles of megaliths on the northern bank of the river were the only items of local heritage that struck the British imagination, and then only as curious vestiges of an ancient past. In 1896, the British official in charge of this area described these megaliths; archaeological expeditions were organized, but produced no striking results (Woolf 1952:18).9

At the time of independence, the Gambia completely lacked a policy of cultural preservation and promotion. A tiny strip of land surrounded by Senegal on three sides, the country gave to many observers the impression of being the artificial result of colonial policies of partition, a nation lacking any real distinctiveness and originality. Fighting these perceptions, with the objective of improving the national image, externally and internally, the Gambians who served as leaders of the nation stressed the importance of bringing back to the public those cultural manifestations and historical memories either ignored by the colonizers or despised as the expression of an inferior stage of cultural development.

Collecting Historical Memories for Future Generations

Valuable information in the memory of old, knowledgeable people is disappearing every day, through death or through the discontinuance of certain customs because of cultural changes and changes in belief and the value system. We cannot wait to collect information. . . . Old people are not like books, which can be stored for generations without too much harm waiting until someone can get around to read them.10

Independence brought with it a politics of history, favored in the beginning by the former colonial masters, who sponsored in different areas of British Africa the establishment of national archives.11 In the Gambia, colonial documents, previously dispersed in the various departments of the colonial administration, were assembled in the newly established national record office, located in the government quarters of Banjul (formerly Bathurst), the capital. This archive constituted an initial step in the establishment of a shared national memory, though it was mainly from the colonizers’

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viewpoint. A deeper insight into local history, and from an African perspec-tive, could be achieved only by taking into account the historical memories still circulating within society. These linked the river to the wider socio-cultural landscape of Senegal, Mali, Guinea-Conakry, and Guinea-Bissau. Narratives described precolonial states and their alliances in the subregion: they recollected heroes of the remote and recent past, offering a moral script for action in modern times.

The need for valorizing this source of historical knowledge was strongly underlined by Bakari Sidibe, the first research officer in charge of the cultural archive. He was a former headmaster, trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), first in the phonetics of West Afri-can languages in the early 1950s, and then in African literature and general linguistics at the end of the 1960s.12 While at SOAS, he had become aware of the growing interest among scholars, intellectuals, and the public for African history. Back in the Gambia, he compiled a preliminary list of the major topics on which oral sources were to be collected, with ethnographic information on every aspect of culture, from folk medicine to dances and religious beliefs.13 Institutionally, the cultural archive was regarded as an extension of the national record office, and so it remained until OHAD came into being.

In that period, the search for an authentic African past, preserved and transmitted across generations, even in the absence of writing, was all but restricted to the Gambia. The growing community of historians of Africa saw colonialism as a short parenthesis in the long run of African history, an interlude that did not substantially alter the continuity of local cultures, and they felt an urge to go back to African sources to uncover the precolo-nial past (Ajayi 1969). African intellectuals and politicians emphasized the virtues of tradition as a source of inspiration and identity in the building of the new nations. The methodology for collecting and processing oral traditions elaborated by Jan Vansina (1961) and his students offered a frame of legitimization and an agenda for fieldwork. Documentation centers were established in Rwanda, Burundi, Niger, and other African countries, and interest in oral history was rapidly growing in Europe as well. “At times,” comments Frederick Cooper (2000:315), “it seemed as though oral history was a fetish as much as a method.”

Griots, education and the national radio

Beside this international interest, two experiences in the Gambia of the 1950s and 1960s predated the idea of constructing a cultural archive as a place to preserve and make accessible to a wider audience local forms of historical and social knowledge. One was related to the field of education; the other, to the establishment of the national radio.

Between 1953 and 1955, the colonial department of education pro-moted an experiment in the school of Faraba Banta to see whether the chil-dren would more easily learn to read and write by studying their mother

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tongue. The teacher in charge was Bakari Sidibe, who would later assume the responsibility of constructing the cultural archive. In 1956, he moved to Yundum Teacher Training College, where another initiative took place: being asked to teach history, he thought of bringing the Gambian viewpoint on local history into the class, to which he invited one of the best griots of the day, Bamba Suso. Names and places heard by the students during their childhood were put into context, and their historical relevance asserted in the contemporary developments of Gambian society. Even those students who looked skeptically at native culture were impressed when the griot answered “confidently and in detail on almost every aspect of Gambian history,” as Sidibe recalls (2005:7).

Bamba Suso and other renowned griots were called to perform for Radio Gambia as soon as transmissions began. The idea of bringing local culture and historical memories into a modern context was again success-ful, as the lectures in the Teacher Training College had proved. Never-theless, most of the tapes were destroyed immediately after being aired, though the program was widely appreciated within the country. Bamba would become an example of the fragility of oral sources, one that OHAD officials would repeatedly use to remark the need of a cultural policy aimed at sustaining the living cultural heritage of the nation. Immediately after his appointment as research officer, in 1971, Bakari Sidibe asked the govern-ment to finance the complete recording of Bamba’s repertoire, but it was too late: a stroke had paralyzed one side of Bamba’s body, and as a consequence, he had lost his ability to remember and narrate. These are the conclusions that Sidibe drew from Bamba’s case:

Bamba and his work might be compared to a wonderful paint-ing in the sand, which is destroyed almost immediately after it is created. There was never anything quite like it before[,] and there will never be anything like it again. Once it is gone, with not even a photograph to record the memory of its exis-tence, anyone who was not an eyewitness at the time would never know the value of what has been lost. Bamba is now dead[,] but there are others like him of talent and knowledge who are masters in their own right. They, too, however[,] will soon pass on[,] and their work and accumulated lifetimes of wisdom will be wasted unless we take serious step[s] to pre-serve at least some of what they have to tell us.14

Educated Gambians of those years, born and reared in rural areas, as Sidibe was, were extremely sensitive to the strains that changes after World War II brought to the local society. Rapid urbanization, the penetration of electoral politics into villages, development projects, and agricultural innovations, were undermining the structures of power and relationships consolidated during colonial times. Democratization was changing people’s attitudes toward their chiefs and depriving the chiefs of privileges that they

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had accumulated in colonial times. In the Gambia of the late 1960s and the 1970s, large entourages of griots were seen as old-fashioned. District chiefs of the new generation, elected in 1964 and 1965 as soon as the first freely chosen government was established, were literate in English and expected to act more as civil servants than as representatives of customs and local traditions. Radio programs attracted youths more than historical narratives did, and innovative forms of entertainment, like sicco drums, had became popular out of the political mobilization of the 1950s.15 Losing the material support of their patrons, artists migrated to the capital, where they put themselves at the service of the political elite. To Sidibe and the researchers who joined him in setting up the cultural archives, this process seemed to be producing the loss and decay of traditional values and culture. To imbue the griots’ craft with new meanings, modern solutions had to be found (Darboe 1976; Galloway 1980b), and these included creating occasions for their performance at the national level, promoting their abilities on the international stage, and publishing transcriptions of their narratives. Paral-lel to these activities were the efforts of recording and transforming verbal arts and oral sources into written texts.

Establishing the Oral and History Antiquities Division

In 1979, OHAD was established as a financially autonomous institution depending on the vice-president’s office. Its location in the structure of the public administration speaks of the symbolic importance assigned to the task of recovering the nation’s fading historical memories. Evaluating the results of the work done during the 1970s and early 1980s, OHAD estimated that its collection of oral sources consisted of roughly 4,000 tapes and more than 2,000 objects intended for display in the future national museum. Research had been carried out in various areas of the country. Narratives about the major precolonial states along the river had been collected, with epic traditions that spoke of the connections between the Gambia valley and the ancient kingdom of Mali, the highlands of Futa Jallon, and the inte-rior of modern Senegal. In addition, OHAD focused on Fula expansionism in the Upper Casamance, Wolof precolonial polities on the north bank of the river, and historical sites relating to European trade.16

To enrich the archive, foreign researchers received logistical support and were asked to leave copies of all the materials collected, thus imple-menting the regulations of the 1974 Monuments and Relics Act as far as historical and ethnographic researches were concerned (Hoover 1987:6). Accordingly, a more organic strategy for the collection and processing of oral traditions, and a list of the main problems arising during fieldwork, were developed by OHAD researchers working with Winifred Galloway, a North American historian attached as a volunteer to the institution. This strategy entailed a clearer statement of OHAD’s policy and cultural mis-sion. Researchers identified privileged categories of narrators and standard-

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ized research procedures, taking their cue from the debates on the historical value of oral traditions that characterized the field of the history of Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s.

What Sources Are Worth Recording?

In late 1960s and 1970s, the search for the best informants were a recurrent worry among the historians of Africa (Henige 1982; Miller 1980; Vansina 1985). According to the methodical literature, each context had rules for transmitting knowledge about the past, and it called upon researchers to grasp these rules and choose their sources of information accordingly, privi-leging those who proved to be more skillful and knowledgeable, both in the eyes of the local community and in those of a professional historian.

Categories of narrators

Following this trend, OHAD identified three main categories of narrators (Galloway 1980b; Sidibe and Galloway 1980) as being useful to reconstruct the precolonial past of the river and surrounding regions. First were the griots, whom local society placed in a specific social category: they were musicians, poets, traditionalists, and bards, who bore the responsibility of producing and reproducing historical knowledge. There were different types of griots: those attached to ruling families, those who performed for hunt-ers, and those who praised the virtues and sang the genealogies of Muslim scholars. Each type produced different memories and narratives about the past, but the most renowned were undoubtedly those whom OHAD offi-cials described as court griots, “those who narrate in epic lines the stories of the great kingdoms and empires, [and] the epic migrations and adven-tures of the great ethnic rulers and heroes and of the great individuals in their own patron families” (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:2). Court griots, like Bamba Suso, acted simultaneously as oral historians and artists. This ten-dency could pose a serious limitation for the historian, underlined OHAD researchers, in that griots’ narratives tended “to be more like a historical novel than ‘pure’ history” (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:2). Fortunately, expe-rience in the field soon taught “that the main lines of the griot’s story are accurate[,] while he fleshes out his story with fictional details, conversa-tions and conflicts in order to illustrate and dramatise the significance of his story” (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:2).

This interpretation had wider political implications, as it provided the emerging nation with the possibility of reconstructing its past from a genu-ine African perspective, cultivating feelings of national pride against the dominant colonial discourse of backwardness and primitivity. Once cleaned up from their cultural embellishment, griots’ narratives became precious historical sources, which spoke of social events, structures, and values.

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Elderly men constituted the second category of narrators and provided what OHAD defined as the most reliable information. Circumscribed in space and time, their knowledge of the past was described as “fairly accu-rate” (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:3). These observations spoke of the regard that OHAD researchers had toward the rules of accountability that in local society regulated the representations of the past. They ordinarily saw griots’ knowledge as potentially moldable by contemporary agendas, but, because the duty of griots was to praise their patrons’ deeds, narratives given by elders were much more respected by the community at large, since speaking properly was a constitutive element of elders’ public authority. Matters of prestige and honor shaped their historical recollections, and qualified their narratives as true and reliable in the people’s eyes.

The third category of narrator was religious scholars. Elderly men displayed knowledge of the past strictly situated in local and regional his-tory. Religious scholars, on their side, shared with griots the ability to locate their reconstruction within wider historical landscapes. Religious scholars helped their memory with written annotations, and thus retained details that griots tended to forget.

Historical texts in local languages

Last, the methodological notes of OHAD mentioned the tarikas, historical texts in local languages, written down in Arabic characters and attentively preserved by religious families. Tarikas were described as an intermediate source between literacy and orality: “the average tarika . . . is rarely more than a few pages long, and seldom consists of more than a bare outline of what the original writer knew” (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:4). Readers had to know the narratives that paralleled these texts to fully understand their meaning. Actually, the topic of tarikas could have brought OHAD researchers to discuss the prestige of Islamic literacy in local societies, and the problems related to the writing down of oral traditions as a by-product of the creation of the cultural archive. Instead, the example of tarikas was politically used to emphasize OHAD’s mission. Research in the field, and then the processing and analysis of oral sources that followed, produced what OHAD officials could label as the “new tarikas”:

The very act of writing down a tape-recorded interview . . . transforms it automatically from oral tradition into a tarika. . . . These “new” tarikas have one major advantage over the traditional tarika[:]. . . . they are full narrative accounts of what the informant knows, rather than lists or outlines. Freed from the cramping limitations of the pen by the tape recorder, articulate informants can allow their minds to wander freely around their subjects. Secondly, if these new tarikas are recorded systematically, there are many of them around a single topic[,] rather than isolated documents from

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here and there, as has been the case up to now. The researcher can have a large number of tarikas to work upon (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:5).

In this passage, OHAD researchers spoke of “articulate informants,” clearly manifesting their attitude toward the world of oral sources. Their collec-tion strategy took for granted and indeed reasserted the importance of local hierarchies, favoring memories that supported existing power structures. Griots, elderly men, and religious scholars were entitled to represent the past in the national archive; their voices were seen as authoritative by OHAD researchers and by the people they met during fieldwork. Women, youths, and other marginal subjects—for instance, seasonal migrants, who regularly came into the country to work in commercial groundnut cultivation—were excluded from the official list of potential informants. These kinds of memories were largely dispersed within society, difficult to approach in a public setting (Leydesdorff, Passerini, and Thompson 1996:8). Compared with a griot’s narrative abilities, the abilities of an elderly man and a religious scholar seemed fragmented and unarticulated, and were thus overlooked in the collecting process.17 Power relationships shaping the production of historical knowledge in the local society were further strengthened by the strategy that OHAD recommended to “find good sources” (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:8).

Implementing the research methodology

As in a library, when working along the river and in the surroundings regions, a researcher had to find “the equivalent of the reference librarian and the card catalogue” (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:8). Prefects in Senegal and commissioners in the Gambia were among the first to be approached, as they had “frequent contact with the most distinguished people under their jurisdiction” and could direct researchers toward their sources (Sidibe and Galloway 1980:8). Elderly villagers and district and village chiefs could help select informants. In the end, the procedure of collecting oral sources in the rural areas reasserted the presence of the state, which OHAD officially represented, and that of local elite. In the light of subsequent debates on the use of oral sources in the history of Africa, these guidelines look seriously limiting, not least because they are based on theoretical assumptions widely undermined by the critical reflections of the late 1980s and 1990s.

In 1989, on the eve of transforming itself into the Research and Docu-mentation Division, OHAD reasserted its methodology (Seibert 1989). In the same year, David W. Cohen (1989) was attacking African historians’ attitude toward oral sources, as lacking a sincere appreciation for what made “oral history different” (Portelli 1998:63). In the effort of control-ling the information collected, maintained Cohen, historians reduced the fluidity of historical memories. Instead, they should have documented the multiple strategies of representing, erasing, and commemorating the past

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at work in the societies they studied. Contemporary interests and agendas shaped personal and collective memories, and this relationship with the present, instead of undermining the value of a source, helped in analyzing the contexts and situations in which the past was recovered and talked about within society at large (White 1990; Tonkin 1992; White, Miescher, and Cohen 2001).18

Similar remarks, though confined to the Gambia, were in the cri-tiques of Donald Wright, a historian who during the early 1970s worked at reconstructing the history of Niumi, a precolonial state located at the mouth of the river. After publishing the results of this research, Wright (1979, 1980) edited two collections of the oral sources he used, thus implic-itly stating their value to the larger community of the historians of Africa. In Niumi, the African-American journalist and novelist Alex Haley (1976; 1998) located Juffureh, what he believed was the original village of his paternal ancestral line. The discovery was made in the early 1970s with the help of the cultural archive of the Gambia, and the great public resonance of Haley’s novel stimulated a heated discussion on the reliability of oral sources (Wright 1981). Reacting to this debate, Sidibe strongly defended the competence of the sources Haley met: he conceded that oral tradition indeed changed from one performance to the other, as they were not memorized “word by word,”19 but he insisted that the essential nucleus of a narrative remained intact. In the early 1990s, Wright reopened this discussion by completely dismissing the historical value of oral sources for reconstructing the “changes that Niumi people went through” before the establishment of colonial rule (Wright 1991:404).

In colonial and postcolonial Gambia, Niumi was considered a Mand-inka state, ruled by a Mandinka elite according to political models that stemmed from the ancient kingdom of Mali. Oral traditions legitimized this perspective without including in the picture the centuries predating the establishment of a British military post at the mouth of the Gambia River, in 1816, a post that would soon develop into the colonial settlement of Bathurst, the future capital of independent Gambia. Migrations of the families were described in a stylized fashion, recollecting their movement from the east—whence all Mandinka in the Senegambia traced their ori-gins—to the Atlantic coast. European records compiled from about 1440 onward were far more useful to understand the interplay between different cultural identities that over the centuries had taken place in this area. Luso-Africans, local elite, and traders from Europe and the interior of modern Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali each contributed to Niumi’s polity, economy, and society (Wright 1991:405). The idea of using oral traditions to uncover an uncontaminated Niumi precolonial past was completely biased: repre-sentations of local history provided by the griots living in the area, and by elderly people and Muslims, explained the development of the contempo-rary situation, but cast no light on the complexities of the precolonial past. “Perhaps,” concluded Wright (1991:406), “I will never know much more than I do now about Niumi, and some of the other Senegambian states,

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before the 19th century.” This statement undermines almost twenty years of efforts devoted by OHAD to the recovery of local historical memories; however, none of the officials at the time wrote a line to defend the theo-retical framework that had inspired the creation of the national archive of oral sources. In the early 1990s, research interests were shifting from the collection and preservation of oral sources to sociological inquires, which answered the demands of the development agencies within the country in an attempt to strengthen the financial capacity of the institution (Sagnia, Ceesay, and Seibert 1989; Seibert and Sidibe 1992; Seibert 1994).

Following the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the Economic Recovery Programme entailed a drastic reduction of the investments in the public sector (McPherson and Radelet 1995). This reduction affected OHAD, the newly established museum, and other public institutions. The country was enduring an economic and political crisis, and historical memories of the precolonial and colonial past, precisely the sources that OHAD had struggled for more than a decade to collect, were pushed to the margins of public concern.

From Oral Sources to Material Culture: The Establishment of the First Exhibitions in the National Museum

In 1985, the National Museum of the Gambia was inaugurated in the colo-nial building that had previously hosted the National Library. The presi-dent, Sir Dawda Jawara, praised the event as a milestone toward future and brighter developments, but his optimism hid a complex and controversial situation.20 Institutionally, the OHAD was experiencing growing financial restraints. Its detachment from the museum, sanctioned in 1983 with the establishment of the Monument and Antiquities Division, restricted its mission to the field of ethnography and oral history, leaving completely aside the collection of artifacts and the work of research behind the creation of the museum.

In a strenuous effort to contrast this decision, which stemmed from a policy aimed at diversifying the activities in the domain of culture, OHAD wrote to the government. Again, its officials highlighted the vital connec-tions between orality and material culture, and the need of carrying out research on both sides simultaneously:

A museum is only a display room for the most interesting col-lections of material objects made. The objects have no mean-ing unless the collector has made some kind of research into the subject. Oral traditions, antiquities and monuments go quite naturally together in a country where the explanations surrounding most traditional, social, intellectual, economic, political and artistic phenomena are still mainly preserved in the oral sphere. . . . The research section of OHAD can exist

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very well without the museum; but can the Museum exist as a living, growing place without a research section? The oral researches feed the museum with the information and objects it needs.21

The document went on to explain how a good national museum should have worked—as a place where citizens were to be educated and cultures exhibited and performed in the meantime. Despite the establishment of the Monuments and Antiquities Division, the construction of the first displays in the national museum depended mainly on the contribution of OHAD researchers, who staged the ethnographic exhibition on the ground floor and the historical gallery on the floor above. Both displays were inspired by the experiences of other African museums, and spoke to the recent political history of the country.

The ethnographic display was conceived as completely out of time, as if the objects shown to the visitors belonged to an unspecified precolonial past, ancient but still alive. By collapsing the representation into more general and comprehensive categories (daily life, cooking and farming utensils, regalia, traditional religion, dress, and ornaments), it avoided any reference to the various ethnic groups of the Gambia River. This choice, as noticed by Anne Gauge (1997), reflected a predominant tendency in African museology in the immediate aftermath of independence: that of exclud-ing from public discourse any echo of tribalism. In the Gambia, this trend resonated with the political ideology of PPP, the party ruling since the early 1960s, and its commitment of keeping ethnicity as much as possible at the margins of the political debate (Hughes 2000). The ethnographic exhibition pursued another objective, that of emphasizing the cultural richness of the provinces. In 1989, Philip Ravenhill commented on its lack of links with the city of Banjul, where the national museum was located. The display depicted a world that was nowhere to be seen in the streets and corners of the capital:

A larger problem that I think needs assertion is the virtual exclusion from the museum of any aspect of Gambian mate-rial culture. The implicit message is that only the rural provinces can be considered culturally important[,] . . . and yet there are fascinating urban traditions. . . . I would suggest that the city of Banjul could easily be used as a site for field-work and collecting, and that this would have a beneficial effect for the museum.22

Actually, the connection between the museum and the larger society was there, though quite difficult for a foreign visitor to notice. The overall con-ception of the ethnographic display stressed the authenticity of traditional and rural life, in the conviction that the authentic heritage of Africa lay far from urbanized areas—an idea still widely shared in the representation

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of Africa during the early 1980s. Again, however, this tendency inscribed itself in the peculiar history of the Gambia, evoking the political debates predominant at the time of independence, when the PPP was stressing the importance of provincial areas in the economic and social life of the coun-try against the agenda of other political parties, which represented mainly the interests of the educated elite living in the capital. The deprivation and marginality of rural Gambians under colonial domination had fueled the early propaganda of PPP, allowing it to become the majority party in the first national election of 1960.23

Ironically, the reassertion of the cultural richness of the provinces made by OHAD researchers through the ethnographic exhibition of the national museum was coming too late, in a sort of nostalgic revival. In mid-1980s, the PPP leadership had almost completely abandoned its origi-nal commitment. In the whole country, the enthusiasm of independence had been replaced by a growing atmosphere of dissatisfaction toward the government and its social and economic performance.24 The 1980s opened with a tragic episode in the postcolonial history of the country, one that today seems almost to have been lost from public and official memory. In 1981, a coup, mobilizing the support of the youths profoundly dissatisfied with the accomplishment of the government, tried to overthrow Jawara. The attempt was repressed, thanks to the intervention of the Senegalese army (Hughes 1991:101). More than five hundred people died, and many youths and militants of the opposition were detained. At the end of the year, the collaboration with Senegal was formalized through the establishment of the Senegambia Confederacy (Hughes 1983; Sallah 1990).

If the ethnographic display recalled the early populist tendency of PPP, the historical gallery described the river and the surrounding regions as an integrated sociocultural space, characterized by centuries of exchanges and cultural interactions (Barry 1988). In so doing, the display supported the cause of the Senegambia Confederacy and stressed the need of disregard-ing the artificial boundaries between Senegal and the Gambia imposed by colonial rule. Exhibiting artifacts, photographs, drawings, maps, and evidence drawn from written and oral sources, the gallery explained the historical developments of the whole subregion from prehistoric to present times. Most of the objects had a deep historical relevance in the local soci-ety, and were documented by oral sources preserved in OHAD’s archive. Colonialism was represented in the last sections, with the achievement of independence and the recent establishment of the Senegambia Confederacy (Gauge 1997:22–23).

In 1989, when the confederacy broke apart, the gallery lost its imme-diate educational purpose, even if the representation of the river in terms of interconnectedness maintained its historical value, especially if one takes into account the debates that followed on the concept of globaliza-tion (Cooper 2001; Wright 1997). OHAD researchers’ predictions had come true. Without the continuous contact with society generated by fieldwork and the injections of new objects and information into the exhibitions, the

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museum became a dusty and unattractive repository of material artifacts. More profound political and cultural changes were as a matter of fact around the corner, as a new coup, the military takeover of 22 July 1994, succeeded in ending PPP rule.

Memories for the Nation or for the Tourist Market? A Changing Scenario for National Cultural Policy

During the early 1990s, OHAD, under the new name of Research and Documentation Division, accomplished its last significant research efforts, carrying out sociological surveys of the Upper River, and of the major urban settlements of the Gambia. The following years witnessed the gradual decline of the institution. Instead of being used as a source of information for creating innovative exhibitions, the national archive of oral sources became a hunting-ground for scholars, Gambian historians, journalists, and students, who wrote on several aspects of Gambian precolonial and colonial history without engaging in fieldwork. The tapes began to deteriorate, and even disappear, with their transcribed and translated texts. It remains to be seen whether this process of decay will be arrested by the current efforts of digitalizing the whole collection of oral sources; moreover, will the research officers of the RDD prove able to capture the resurgent global interest for intangible heritage in order to revitalize their institution?

Their predecessors’ ability consisted in linking the national agenda for cultural heritage with the international community’s shared concern for the history of Africa. Their quest for the past looked to the future (Clif-ford 2004). Projects financed by the World Bank at the end of the 1990s, even if originally taking into account the domain of oral sources, ended by emphasizing the cultural relevance of historical sites and tangible heritage (National Council for Arts and Culture 1998). In 1994, a military takeover accelerated a meaningful shift in the country’s cultural policy, underway since the late 1980s as a consequence of the Economic Recovery Programme. Before 1985, the idea of constructing the identity of the nation by means of recovering and preserving its past heritage predominated: “the kind of material which OHAD is collecting, and which [it] is trying to present to its public, is of the category which will give people at least some indication of where we come from.”25

After 1985, the accent was put on the promotion of the Gambia in the international tourist market, paralleling the efforts of the government in developing tourism. Attached for a short period to the Ministry of Youth and Education, the National Council for Arts and Culture later became subject to the Ministry of Tourism. This trend intensified in the aftermath of the coup. During two years of military rule, the regime engaged in building monuments, in the double effort of embellishing the capital and providing work for the unemployed. In 1996, the first Roots Homecoming Festival was organized to celebrate the interconnectedness between the Gambia and the

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Americas created by centuries of traffic in slave across the Atlantic. The initiative aimed at attracting African-American visitors to the Gambia after the dramatic decline of the tourist industry provoked by the British high commissioner’s negative reactions to the military junta. It responded to the international interest for the memories of slavery and slave trade sponsored during the 1990s by UNESCO programs.26

Return to civilian rule occurred in 1996, after elections were won by the leader of the coup and its newly formed political party, the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (Hughes 2000; Saine 2004). In 2002, the dismantling of the ethnographic exhibit on the ground floor of the national museum, and the creation of a new display, brought these political developments to the stage, celebrating the achievements of the Second Republic.

In all this process, a symbolic fracture in the recent past of the coun-try began to emerge. A struggle over postcolonial history is going on in the Gambia, one that would be worth exploring in its implications. The statist narrative (Roberts 2000:521–522) of the military regime stigmatized the First Republic, practically almost thirty years of Gambian history, as an age of corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency, when the govern-ment was dominated by a Mandinka elite that kept minority groups at the margins of national politics. The pattern of negotiated alliances that supported Jawara’s government before and after the attempted coup of 1981 completely disappeared from public view, along with the cultural and historical heritage of provincial Gambia. Contemporary cultural policies focus almost entirely on the capital and surrounding tourist areas, with the remarkable exception of Kanillai, the president’s hometown, which has developed into a national attraction. The testimony of what OHAD did, in terms of research and exhibitions, is preserved in only a few official docu-ments, and in the recollections of the people who worked for the institution. Like the old tarikas, the written evidence needs the support of narratives and recollections to be fully understood. Built to preserve oral sources from the destruction of changing times, this institution ends being remembered mainly through orality. There is a striking moral in this story. More than a “passive repository” of past events (Portelli 1998:69), memory is a creative process of interpretation. An archive of oral sources lives so far as research guarantees its connection with society at large and with the changing attempts of groups and individuals of keeping the present in touch with the plurality of its past.

AcknowLedgements

the writing of this article occurred while I held an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the Uni-

versity of Bayreuth for the academic year 2004–2005. my gratitude goes to the Humboldt founda-

tion and the Institute of African studies of the University of Bayreuth, which in the summer of 2005

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sponsored the visit to germany of Bakari sidibe, former research officer of oHAd and retired execu-

tive director of the national council for Arts and culture, Banjul, the gambia. this visit allowed the

deepening of my research collaboration with Bakari sidibe, begun in 1992.

notes

1. the Unesco convention on Intangible Heritage was signed in 2003.

2. Besides these two accomplishments (the creation of the archive of oral sources and of the

national museum), oHAd worked in the field of preservation, censusing, studying, and

restoring the historical sites and monuments of the gambia. It produced publications on

several topics and encouraged the artists on a national level. In 1989, the establishment of

the national council for Arts and culture distributed these activities among three different

departments: research and documentation division, monument and Antiquities division,

and creative Arts and Performances division. during the 1990s, the exhibition on slavery at

Albreda-Juffureh and the stone circle exhibition in wasu were established.

3. national council for Arts and culture Act, n. 11, 1989. the ncAc came into being in the early

months of the following year. see Hoover 1987:6 and national council for Arts and culture

1991.

4. for a more general perspective on the politics of culture and culture heritage in the immedi-

ate aftermath of African independences, see, for instance, fauré 1978, and, for a comparison

with mali, schultz 1996.

5. most historical sites related to the traffic in slaves across the Atlantic had already disap-

peared in the early nineteenth century. the only visible traces were the ruins of fort st.

James, on an island in the mouth of the gambia river, and fort Bullen, built by the United

kingdom after the banning (in 1807) of the slave trade across the Atlantic. Both forts have

been restored, and fort st. James is on the Unesco world Heritage List. see meagher and

samuel 1998.

6. the official viewpoint is summarized in gray 1966, author of the first history of the river

gambia, and in the ethnographic-research outlines compiled by daryl forde 1945.

7. ethnographic surveys were carried out by colonial officials in the early twentieth century

and then again in the 1930s, following the formalization of indirect rule. this second wave

of inquiries included small collections of folktales and proverbs. Histories of the districts

were compiled quoting the written evidence accumulated since the beginning of colonial

administration. All these colonial materials are presently stored in the national record office

of the gambia, Banjul, the Quadrangle.

8. Both epic traditions were collected and edited during the 1960s by gordon Innes (1974,

1976); later, work on this subject was carried out by oHAd. for a preliminary assessment

of oral traditions in the senegambia, see cissoko and sambou 1969; for a critical appraisal

of oral traditions along the river gambia, see wright 1981 and 1991; for an overview of

mandinka spoken arts, see Pfeiffer 1997.

9. national record office, Banjul, the gambia, Annual Reports on Provinces 32/1, 1896. see also

Unesco Archives, Paris, rn/PP/consULtAnts/2242/rmo/rd/cLo, sènègal. Prèservation et

mise en valeur du patrimoine archéologique, second missione, 25/10–25/12.

10. Bakari sidibe’s Private Archive, the oral History and Antiquities division (now Institute of

cultural research): function, structure, accomplishments; undated paper, p. 1.

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11. curtin (1960) in the Journal of African History commented on the process. Later debates

focused on the nationalist agenda of the first researches in the field of the history of Africa,

in an effort to distance historical analysis from African politics (Jewsiewicki 1989; Jewsiewicki

and mudimbe 1993). see also ellis 2002:5.

12. Bakari sidibe’s Private Archive, Curriculum Vitae.

13. Bakari sidibe’s Private Archive, Prc/3806/24B, Public records office, the Quadrangle,

Bathurst, 17 november 1971.

14. Bakari sidibe’s Private Archive, 4 october 1983, Proposal for griot’s recording, p. 5. After

Bamba’s death, the collection of griots’ narratives became a priority of the culture archive,

one that would be inherited by oHAd. Projects for griots’ recording were presented time

and again, and the oHAd encouraged the creation of an association of gambian griots, in a

new form of patronage centered on the state.

15. Sicco, drummers who composed political songs used during the propaganda and electoral

campaigns, mixed new rhythms with the local tradition of praising the deeds of heroes and

men of prestige. the sicco became a symbol of PPP early mobilization efforts, as described

in the official history of the party (PPP 1992:41; Bakari sidibe, personal communication,

2002).

16. Among the major initiatives carried out by oHAd in the 1970s and 1980s are 1) the collec-

tions of oral sources on kaabu, one of the most important precolonial centralized polities

of the Lower senegambia (Brooks 1993), and the publication of some of the research results

(galloway 1980a, 1980b; sidibe 1972); 2) the collaboration with the genealogical society of

Utah, which funded collections on the history of kombo, an area by the capital city of Banjul,

and on kombo family genealogies (seibert 1989:24); 3) the fuladu conference, organized

in 1986, together with the government of senegal. national record office, mAd 1/21, 23/

4/1986, conference on Baldeh family history.

17. diawara 1990 makes one of the first assessments of the plurality of oral sources and the role

of women in narrating history in a west-African context. Bellagamba 2002a illustrates the

differences between elderly men and women’s narratives. during my fieldwork in the Upper

gambia, I repeatedly noticed how men despised women’s ability to narrate: men described

women as lacking hakilo, the capacity of remembering events and the intelligence of

understanding the larger political implications of their recollections. Janson 2002 explores

the role of female griots in a rural area of the Upper gambia.

18. ranger 2004 offers a recent example of the struggle over the past in several postcolonial

settings. debates on memory and the production of history in Africa have paralleled the

growing interest shown by anthropologist to the dynamics of remembering and forgetting

in contemporary African society. Amid a large literature, the works of fabian 1996, shaw

2002, and werbner 1998 are particularly illuminating.

19. Bakari sidibe’s Private Archive, 14 April 1977, an answer to mark ottaway’s critique of Roots.

see also wright 1981.

20. national record office, monuments and Antiquities division, mAd 31, Inauguration of the

Gambia National Museum (1985), foreword by the President.

21. Bakari sidibe’s Private Archive, 10 may 1983, mUs/004/06/02 (29). Like other sectors of the

public service, oHAd was not immune to the influence of patronage networks relating to

the ruling party.

22. national record office, Banjul, the gambia, mAd 1/21, 1989, P. L. ravenhill, some suggestions

concerning the national museum, Banjul, the gambia.

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23. during the first half of the twentieth century, Bathurst had attracted most of the colonial

investments in the field of education and services, sanitation, and infrastructure. Although

the major source of revenue for the government, the protectorate areas had been left

in a condition of stagnation (see gailey 1964). for a history of the early developments of

Bathurst, see mahoney 1963.

24. the first secessions in the rows of the PPP dated to the mid-1970s, when some of the early

and more committed militants contested the politics of national reconciliation promoted

by dawda Jawara and his sharing of power with the elites of the capital city (Hughes 1975).

In the 1970s, the government’s plans for development shifted from the rural to the growing

urban areas (sallah 1990; wright 1997:228–229). As a consequence, rural youths felt aban-

doned by that party that they enthusiastically supported.

25. Bakari sidibe’s Private Archive, the oral History and Antiquities division (now institute of

cultural research): function, structure, accomplishments; undated paper, p. 2.

26. namely, the slave routes Project, launched by Unesco in 1993. I have commented on the

effects of this international interest on the cultural policy of the gambia in Bellagamba

2001.

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