What the US can learn from Gambia about defeating petty tyrants

This article What the US can learn from Gambia about defeating petty tyrants was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This is part of a series of interviews with experienced organizers and movement thinkers on ways to defend and expand democracy amidst the rising authoritarian tide globally.

Yahya Jammeh rose to power in Gambia through a coup d’etat in 1994. For 22 years, his rule was characterized by autocracy, politically motivated torture, killings and poor geopolitical relations with neighbors.

In 2016, Jammeh was finally pushed out of power in the country of about three million citizens. His overthrow is largely credited to the people of Gambia, who mobilized against yet another coup attempt by the Jammeh regime. (Defeated at the polls, Jammeh had conceded to victor Adama Barrow, but then reneged on that concession.) Out of this political circus rose a movement using the hashtag #GambiaHasDecided. The mobilization effort included scores of women and youth who, in prior months, had flooded Gambian streets with traditional hollowed-out gourds called calabashes to symbolize the sharing of power and a transition to a less authoritarian form of government. Backed by the threat by the Economic Community of West African States to extract Jammeh by force from Gambia if necessary, this democratic movement’s final push — which centered digital activism in the wake of a bout of immense repression — protected Barrow’s election in the end.

Now Jammeh enjoys a luxurious life-in-exile in Equatorial Guinea at the invitation of Teodoro Obiang, the second-longest serving non-royal dictator in the world. Barrow, a business tycoon, has pillaged the country economically and has come under sharper criticism in recent years, having rolled back some of the democratic advancements presumed to have been made with his inauguration. Although Gambian organizers still have a long journey to traverse, we can learn how they protected the vote and put a definitive end to one man’s grip on power.

Alieu Bah is an educator on political economy from Gambia. He helped organize #GambiaHasDecided, guided national political discourse through traditional and social media during the later years of Jammeh’s rule, and helped form many economic protest groups, such as Occupy Westfield, which fought for access to water and electricity. During Jammeh’s failed coup, Alieu and many others were exiled to neighboring Senegal where they launched the Help Gambia Desk in border towns to help move people to safety.

Having organized and theorized under repressive conditions across Africa, and having offered strategic support and popular education to movements across the continent, I spoke with Alieu to get his guidance on what to do about the resurgence of Donald Trump and far-right politics in the U.S.

It’s important that we learn from people like you about what to do with autocrats. What kind of strategies do we use to outlast them and to defeat them? Given your experience in Gambia, I thought it would be great to talk to you.

Yeah, that’s always a passionate conversation to have: defeating petty tyrants and the big ones also. Because at the end of the day, the whole point of our struggle is just that we must live free and die free.

I’ve been observing the situation in America, but I’m not an expert — like how we have our so-called “western experts on Africa.” This will just be a conversation among comrades on how to defeat these terrible people who usurp the rights and the freedoms of the people.

In your organizing I’m sure you faced censorship and propaganda. What did these kinds of obstacles look like when you were trying to oust Jammeh?

Actually, the most difficult bit of it was that Jammeh has posited himself as an Africanist. He did some things that, when you look outside, look very progressive. He was an African leader who rejected the Economic Partnership Agreements — the EPAs of the IMF — which were terrible for African countries because they took neoliberalism to its logical conclusion. So Jammeh was one of the few African leaders, or perhaps the only, who rejected it. Then he would come to the U.N. and say radical pan-Africanist things.

Jammeh is not what you think he is, what he is professing. We also see that with [Uganda’s dictator Yoweri] Museveni, right? He has positioned himself as a pan-Africanist and as a patron of the Pan-Africanist movement.

So yes, in Gambia specifically, that was something that we faced in the beginning. I even see it with Trump. I hear people saying, “But you know, at least Trump, he says the truth. He’s not hypocritical like other leaders; he just says it as it is.” 

So, there’s always those possibilities where people who are from the outside become antagonistic to our struggles. They even put the tag of reactionary on you. “Why are you fighting a progressive government? Why are you fighting someone who is trying to do something for the people?” So we faced that in how Jammeh positioned himself.

The U.S. has always been extremely violent and repressive in a multi-layered kind of way. But we’re seeing more overt police brutality and repression of various kinds. Of course, in Jammeh’s administration, this was just the day-to-day running of things: imprisonment, torture. What do you recommend in terms of preparing for repression and navigating some of those high-risk political situations?

I think one of the first things that I always advise in those situations is that we must also prioritize safety. In most of these cases, people either consciously or unconsciously tend to be martyrs. This martyrdom syndrome doesn’t help our cause. When the only option is for us to be martyrs, then we’ll be martyrs. But at most times, it’s important that we know how to be safe, especially in America where surveillance is at the highest level. 

Building solidarity can also help when the stakes are high, but where to begin?

When we were fighting against Jammeh, there were a lot of different forces. Some people were fighting Jammeh because they didn’t like his tribe. Some people were fighting him because they didn’t like the way he speaks. Some people were fighting him because he was a poor person, just a common soldier. So that point is important: that we unite our forces. Because the moment Jammeh fell, the forces that were supposed to advance the struggle all fell into different camps and started fighting each other, which is not unusual. 

So, it’s important that there is at least some sort of a minimum program among the organizers against Trump’s authoritarianism. You need a program that people can unite and fight around, instead of everybody having their little program here and there, and everybody having their main objectives. Of course, you can have your maximum program, but for the minimum program, at least you have a clear united front. 

The minimum program must be workable, something that we can all agree on, an articulation of what is the problem, how do we solve it, which forces can we solve them with, which forces are going to be against this program, and who are our friends and who are our enemies. And I can guarantee you, the most difficult thing in this world is not even unseating a tyrant; it’s to bring movements together to agree on a common purpose.

So right now, we don’t have that luxury of fighting amongst each other with lengthy resolutions. We have to look at this as a struggle of life and death. Even we who are here debating and disagreeing with each other, it’s important to create a program that can be disseminated and taught as political education and a rallying cry.

What are some of the keys to mass political education?

Our struggle suffered a lot without clarity. I’m talking about the Gambian struggle here and also the African struggle. It’s important that we look at what exactly it is that we are fighting against, because the common person in America, if you come to them and start telling them we have to destroy the heteronormative, patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist system, they’re like, “What are you talking about?”

Our clarity will enable us to break that down in a way that this person will feel that the situation effects them directly. And this is a very important point, because when you don’t have the people on your side, trust me, you will fight and the monster will keep getting stronger and you will just keep losing.

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So it’s important that we are very clear about what we are fighting about in such a way that we can rally the people around our cause and they will accept it. Our people are our mountains, like [African revolutionary and Pan-Africanist Amílcar] Cabral said. I want to say we are not in the age of guerrilla struggle or armed struggle, but in our context right now, our struggle is mainly to rally the people in a way that we can frustrate power without even using violence from our side. It’s always the system that is violent towards us.

We can create something beautiful and something righteous by not even lifting an arm. The people are the many. They are the ones who can withdraw from the system and make it fall. Trump cannot rule an empty country; he cannot rule an ungovernable country. But for that [withdrawal] to happen, the people must be able to understand exactly what is the problem.

How can Americans organizing against Trump position themselves among the people to tilt the balance in their favor?

There’s a lot of people who are supporting him in America, willing to even die for him. But if they are able to know the implications of this guy coming to power, then they’ll probably shift loyalties. This also shows the sort of work we must do in our communities. When the struggle against capitalism began as a scientific process, when Marx and Engels did all that work, at that time we were talking about the factory and workplace setting. But today we know capitalism has become so diverse and so complicated that — even the Zoom we’re using right now, it’s a capitalism instrument — we are stuck saying “We’re going to the Zoom workroom to create something for the proletariat or the workers.”

How do we also understand the importance of being in the community instead of, let’s say, the workplace? How do we be with the people where they are, because we are also part of the people? Sometimes we also talk about the people as if we are different or we are not the people. We come from our communities, so it’s important to be in the community and to explain to people and to be compassionate in that process — and have deep understanding that it is not simply that people don’t wake up and understand things. Even we in the movement didn’t just wake up and understand these things. When we joined the movement, and as we grew, we learned how much we didn’t know before.

It’s important to have that humility, to have that compassion, and to understand that what we are trying to create is a world filled with love, laughter and beauty. It’s not a world that is rigid, hierarchical and monstrous.

There are tried-and-true political campaigning tactics to defeat a candidate in the U.S. But with Trump, it feels like there is something deeper, something not immediately apparent, in American society that we must reckon with. Does the struggle against Jammeh offer any light about this?

It’s not only through protest that we unseat a tyrant. These tyrants all share one universal characteristic — whether it’s Trump, whether it’s Jammeh, whether it’s Museveni, whether it was Pol Pot — they have this ego that cannot sustain them. Imagine Trump shows up somewhere and there’s no one there. In Gambia this was also part of the act of demystification. Because one of the ways that people become tyrants and rule over us is because there is this mystical element. 

One of the ways these people have ruled over the vast majority of humanity is this mystification process. Sometimes it can be a spiritual mystification, but most of the time it’s not even spiritual. For example, Yahya Jammeh had convinced Gambians that he was the one who had come to end corruption and insecurity and all of those things in Gambia, and in that process, he created this cult of personality where he was hiring and firing his cabinet all the time.

He created this idea in peoples’ minds that he might be many things. You know how people say something like, “Oh, you know, Phil may be many things, but at least he’s not corrupt.”

It starts as a little thing, but eventually it grows into this total mystification where even people who are against you will actually affirm certain qualities you have set out to create for yourself. You’ll meet someone who’s like, “I don’t like Trump, but he tells the truth.”

“At least he didn’t have dirty emails like Hillary.”

Exactly. This is one of the pitfalls of liberal politics — that we focus so much on the individual and what the individual has done and has not done. And we forget that this individual emerges out of a system and they are out to defend a system.

The system itself is not a mystical thing. So how can you hate capitalism, but you still endorse somebody who is a defender of capitalism because they have some individual qualities that are very nice?

Dictators and tyrants thrive a lot on that individual morality. So, it’s important to recognize that our struggle is a moral issue, but it transcends this individual morality. You know, a capitalist doesn’t have to be good or bad. You know, you can even have a capitalist who will give good wages and all of that. But at the same time, he’s also participating in a productive process that impoverishes those very people receiving those good wages.

It’s important to recognize how individual moralism, or basically false moralism, can capture the people. And it goes back to the question of mystification that happened through a process of sentimentalizing.

So that’s why when you look at Trump’s “make America great again,” you don’t even ask “was it ever great in the first place?” At what time, when you ask an Indigenous person or a Black person or a gay person in America, do they say America was ever great?

So, it’s important that we also deconstruct that, in that we don’t fall into the trap of accepting the individual and rejecting the system. The system is made of individuals. So, it’s important to situate our leaders within the system that they promote. Because when somebody tells me “I’m an anti-capitalist,” and then they tell me “I still support Trump,” I must clarify that he’s a billionaire in that system. 

So what do you do to demystify Jammeh, or anybody who’s in power in Gambia? What does that demystification look like in practice?

It’s a difficult process in practice. The Gambian diaspora, for example, was very good at exposing his corrupt practices, including with facts and figures and all of that, which is very important. It’s always important to really bring out what these people are really doing in the background, even at an individual level: What are they doing with the money?

The breaking point for Gambians was that Jammeh had assassinated a lot of people, but most of these people were unknown to us. And the others that we knew, we couldn’t relate to, because most of them were from the petite bourgeoisie class — rich people or upper-middle class.

But then in 2016, the year he fell, he killed an opposition leader who had gone to protest the draconian electoral laws he had ushered in. He was a politician. We didn’t even care about his politics. But this guy came from the community, and we knew his kids. We were all moving in the same circles. 

It became personal. Something very close to home. It went from this impersonal, “Oh, I know this person from the media, but I don’t really know them” to “He can even kill these people.” So people were like, “What the fuck?” That really just changed everything. They realized then, that Jammeh is really a murderer.

It sounds crass and inhumane to “leverage that moment,” but you had to in order to restore a humane Gambia. How did you do it?

We pushed the narrative. It was a good opportunity.

When he assassinated that person, the opposition leaders from that party that the guy who was killed came from went to protest. They were mostly old men, and they were beaten on the street. And you know how it goes everywhere in the world. When you see an old person being tortured by young people, of course you feel something.

We pushed that narrative: This guy is just a petty idiot who doesn’t care about the people. And when people see you beating an old man or an old woman, they don’t even have to know you. 

The first phase was murdering someone who was connected, whose kids we all knew. And then the second phase: He beat these old people. So, we use that narrative to explain to people, how can you really trust a person you think is good and spiritual, but is doing this?

How exactly do you articulate that narrative and unmask a seemingly almighty despot?

Sometimes in our attempt to demystify, we mystify even more. When we go into those complex things about Trump being a capitalist who has amassed monopoly capital, people are like, “What now? What is monopoly capital?” You’re making him look so evil and mystical. So those terms, how do we break them down in very simple terms? 

The people have to see it for themselves. Sometimes an image can do all the work. A dictator can do one little thing. For example, in Kenya, I’m sure you have seen that video of that reverend who was being kicked on the road during the struggle for multi-party politics. Police just beat him like a dog. We also have to utilize that. 

Trump is just another person who is being a petty dictator and tyrant because he likes to validate his ego and protect his business and his cronies’ businesses. So disarm him for what he is: Nothing more than a petty individual.

That’s what we did in Gambia. In 2016, that process accelerated. It took from April to December for him to fall. This process of demystification is powerful. And it helps to bring progressive forces together in parallel with the demystification.

This article What the US can learn from Gambia about defeating petty tyrants was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/09/lessons-from-gambia-about-defeating-petty-tyrants/