The battle of the tribalists: Saul Khan jumps into the fray.

Is Samsudeen Sarr suffering from dementia?

By Ebrima Sanneh

Dear Editor,
Please allow me to respond to Saul Khan's article, captioned On Sam Sarr, Ethnic Nationalism and the Quest for a Gambia Nation as published in your paper on January 25.
Thank you for the space and keep up the good work!

The battle of the tribalists: Saul Khan jumps into the fray.
Perhaps, I didn’t get the gist of Saul Khan’s vitriolic response to Samsudeen Sarr’s biased article.  Or just perhaps I am slow witted and I did not capture the ‘brilliance’ or ‘intelligence’ that other readers saw in his write-up.

What I rather discerned was a very verbose and arrogant attempt by yet one more tribalist to debunk the narrow-minded and ill-formed comments of another tribalist. If you remove all the repetitions, tired clichés, irrelevant historical references and silly innuendos from Khan’s text, you will be left with nothing but a carcass, a shell from an angry man who has done a good job at exhibiting his own paranoia and bigotry.

Instead of exposing Sarr for the intellectual fraud and bigot that he is, Khan decided to give us more than an earful of an imaginary Mandinka – Wollof rift, sometimes making sweeping remarks against the latter, the very crime for which he reproached the erstwhile military officer.  Not only did I find his innuendo about Wollof women craving for Mandinka men rude, but quite insulting to an entire people, to put it mildly. What statistics did he use to arrive at this conclusion?  This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Yes! Sarr had used the same generalization to indict an entire ethnic group for Dr. Manneh’s alleged haughty behavior.

What does Khan mean when he says that Wollofs should live with the defeat they suffered at the hands of the PPP and should instead move on?  Did he carry out a scientific poll among Wollofs to arrive at this position?  What a display of ethnic arrogance! Where Sarr wants to re-write Gambian history, Khan wants to bury it. Jabs from one, body blows from another, as the tribalist crowd revels in the slugfest and cheers on their fighters!

Since Sarr came up with his unwarranted attack on the Mandinka, how can one fail to notice that most, if not all, of the reactions came from people of the same ethnic background?  One would think that these responses would be tempered more by logic and less by emotion.   But, oh no! Each day we are treated to more bigotry, from Suntou’s couched language to Yanks Darboe’s open manifestation of genocidal thoughts.

Is Samsudeen Sarr suffering from dementia?  His hateful tribal comments and his disdain of his own African language make me wonder if he is afflicted with some inferiority complex.  Why is Sarr speaking up now when he loyally served the government of D.K. Jawara?  I can’t still fathom how Sarr would relegate the Wollof language to the dustbin, a language that is being taught in Ivy League schools across America.

I find equally reprehensible Khan’s Mandinka posturing - although he admits that he is a Fula - and his regurgitating of population statistics to back up his claims, a behavior typical of a racist or ethnic supremacist.  Why does he see his own people in quantified representations?  This smacks of a colonial mentality: the counting and re-counting of people for the sake of dividing them, a practice hitherto unknown to Africa before the advent of colonialism.

Can you guys see the irony of it all? Samsudeen Sarr a wollofised-Serer and Saul Khan a mandinkanised-Fula igniting the fires of hatred between two ethnic groups that have always lived side by side in peace.

These men should be ashamed of themselves. And to the rabble-rousers, I say shame on you for fueling the fires of hatred and anger!  Long live one Gambia!

Ebrima Sanneh.