Dawda Jawara

Dawda Jawara was the ruler of the Gambia from 1962 until 1994, prime minister at independence in February 1965 and president when the country became a republic in 1970. He was the veterinary surgeon who led the smallest country in Africa through twenty-nine years of multiparty elections, every one of which he won. He was removed in July 1994 by a lieutenant of twenty-nine while he was receiving an American warship. He was a Mandinka from Barajally on the river, the son of a trader. He trained as a vet at Glasgow and was the colony's chief veterinary officer. He founded the People's Progressive Party in 1959 among the up-river farmers against the Bathurst Wolof who had run the colony's politics. He won the election of 1962 and negotiated the independence that London had thought impossible for a country of three hundred thousand people that was a river with a bank on each side and Senegal all round it. The years were the groundnuts, which were the whole economy. There was the tourism that began in the 1960s with the Swedes and made the beaches. There were the drought of the 1970s, the human rights record that was the best in the region and the corruption that was ordinary. There was the coup attempt of July 1981 by a Marxist called Kukoi Sanyang while he was at Charles and Diana's wedding, put down by Senegalese troops at a cost of five hundred dead. There was the Senegambian confederation that followed it in 1982 and dissolved in 1989 when it was clear that Dakar wanted a merger and Banjul did not. He was knighted in 1966. He founded the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, which sits in Banjul. He had said in 1992 that he would retire, and did not. The young officers who had not been paid for their Liberian service gave that as their reason on 22 July 1994. Jammeh's soldiers took Banjul without a shot. He left on the USS La Moure County for Dakar. He lived in exile in England. He was allowed home in 2002 under an amnesty. He lived quietly at Fajara through the whole of Jammeh's rule, which did not touch him, and through the two years of Barrow's. He died in August 2019 at ninety-five. He was given a state funeral by the democracy that had come back, as the man who had had it first.

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