| Submit your comments on this article |
| Africa Subsaharan |
| President: No English Please, We're Gambians |
| 2014-03-14 |
| [An Nahar] Gambia ... The Gambia is actually surrounded by Senegal on all sides but its west coast. It has a population of about 1.7 million. The difference between the two is that in colonial days Senegal was ruled by La Belle France and The Gambia (so-called because there's only one of it, unlike Guinea, of which there are the Republic of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, New Guinea, the English coin in circulation between 1663 and 1813, and Guyana, which sounds like it should be another one) was ruled by Britain... will drop English as its official language, President Yahya Jammeh said in his latest diatribe against former colonial power Britannia. "We're going to speak our own language," he said, without specifying which of the poor west African country's indigenous tongues would replace English. The 48-year-old Gambian strongman is often pilloried for rights abuses and the muzzling of the press, and members of the diaspora have set up critical news outlets against Banjul. A video of his latest broadside against Britannia, delivered in English during the swearing-in of a new chief justice on Thursday, was uploaded on YouTube. The country has several languages to choose from as a replacement for English. Two in five Gambians speak Mandinka, while Fula or Wolof are used by another 34 percent. Jammeh himself is from the minority Jula tribe, which speaks a Manding language most closely related to Bambara, spoken in nearby Mali. Gambia, a country of about 1.8 million, is a finger of territory flanking the Gambia River, with Senegal ... a nation of about 14 million on the west coast of Africa bordering Mauretania to the north, Mali to the east, and a pair of Guineas to the south, one of them Bissau. It is 90 percent Mohammedan and has more than 80 political parties. Its primary purpose seems to be absorbing refugees... on either side and a narrow Atlantic coastline. In 2008, Jammeh gave an ultimatum to gays and lesbians to leave his country, saying he would "cut off the head" of any homosexual found in Gambia. Two years later the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... cancelled 22 million euros ($30 million) of aid because of concerns over human rights One man's rights are another man's existential threat. and governance issues. Gambia stunned the Commonwealth mainly grouping former British colonies by withdrawing from the 54-nation bloc in October, branding it "an extension of colonialism". Jammeh said Britannia had "no moral platform" to talk about human rights anywhere in the world. "What brought the British in the first place to Gambia... was trade in ivory because Gambia had a lot of elephants," he said. "They ended up wiping out the elephants and then turned around and started selling Africans. The British instituted slavery." "The only thing they left us with is unfortunately the English language," he said. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #4 About 30,000 people speak Jula. Tops. In Senegal and Gambia combined. Most Gambians know enough of other tribal languages to transact business in the market. I was going to ask how Jammeh proposes to keep a functioning government without a common language for paperwork, but he doesn't need no steenkin' paperwork; he has his bully boys. By the way, Mauretania is just a little ways to the north; and while it supposedly outlawed slavery, finally, in 1989, this law is more honored in the breach than the observance. The Arabs continue to be a big market for slaves from this area. Senegal gets a lot of black Africans fleeing slavery in the North African countries. |
| Posted by: mom 2014-03-14 10:14 |
| #3 Might as well start to learn Russian. It's only a matter of time before Putin gets around to it... |
| Posted by: Spot 2014-03-14 09:56 |
| #2 And who did the Brits buy those slaves from, señor? Not native Mohammedans, oh noes?! |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2014-03-14 07:40 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2014-03-14 05:13 |