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by Alagie Saidy Barrow.
I know Lamin. I know Mariama. He is so kind and so humble. He won’t hurt a fly. She is so caring and religious. She is the consummate professional. You hear these niceties being said about almost every one of us. And if you were to ask those who know some of these murderous police officers in Minnesota, their family and friends will tell you that they are good people too. From the most wicked, to the most docile in the face of evil, yes, they are all very good people, and caring and loving and professional, to some people that know them. But is there also an evil side or an evil-tolerating side to them? What makes a person good or evil, Oceans once asked? What motivates a person to stand aside and watch the perpetuation of evil against another person? Can someone so good also be evil, or can a good person tolerate abiding evil against fellow citizens? Isn’t everyone good to someone? Satan is so good to some people that they worship him! Hitler is so good to some people that his ideology is the uniting factor for millions! And some people, including reprobates like Jam Sarr, who advocated for the shooting of protesters and claimed Solo Sandeng deserved to die, still dream about the return of Yaya Jammeh’s evil. When that evil returns, he wants to compound the evil with training the Gambian Army in gorilla tactics so that they can fight Senegal because he is angry they helped force his demigod out. Talk about the Stockholm syndrome. (don’t mind his lies denying his position now that he is face to face with his own stupidity).
Watching the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police officers, my focus was not only on the knee of the police officer as he snuffed a life he never gave, I was also focused on the officer that was standing at the head of George Floyd looking around and away as a man was being killed. He was not “actively” part of those that were pinning George Floyd down to death, he was just there looking around and ignoring Floyd’s cries of death. Imagine if that was his family member. Would he have stood there and minded his business as a man was being killed?
Robert Stevenson’s intrigue with how people change personalities in different circumstances is what led him to create the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In the novella, Dr Jekyll uses a certain chemical to morph into his evil alter ego, Mr Hyde. In real life, we don’t need the chemicals of Dr Jekyll to morph from good to the evil, but then one wonders, what does it take to bring out the evil in supposedly good people? Conversely, what does it take to suppress the good in good people such that we are able to either participate or condone or turn a blind eye to evil or rights abuses? If we are all brothers and sisters as we like to claim, how can we ignore unkindness or act unkind to others? I know some family members hate their own with passion but I think we can agree that those are outliers; not the norm. You hear people say of others “so and so will not hurt a fly”, and then I wonder how do they condone the killing or rape of a person by another?
Let’s appose the actions of the “bystander” police officer to the actions of many of us here during Jammeh’s reign of terror. When Yaya Jammeh and his thugs were busy raping and killing our people, how many of us heard the cries of the murdered and saw the pain of rape on the faces of our women and pretended to not see anything? How many of us continued to pretend as if all was well and continued to look away no matter how close we were to the brutalities? How many of us saw the battered bodies of individuals that passed through the dungeons of the SIS/NIA and pretended as if we never saw them. Some of these victims were paraded on GRTS! Did we think these victims deserved what they got, so we didn’t care like Jam Sarr said of Solo Sandeng? Didn’t Pa Nderry Mbaye (along with many other platforms) report on many of the abuses and killings on the pages of Freedom and elsewhere? Or is it your position that you never heard or seen of the rapes and killings? Or was it just more comfortable to your conscience to consign those rapes and killings as mere conjecture or rumor? And is that because those raped and killed were not kin or kith to you?
The best way to soothe one’s conscience in the face of evil is to pretend it’s not happening or simply find ways to justify it. You employ all sorts of denial mechanisms to tell yourself that the evil taking place right under your nose either does not exist at all, or that it is necessary evil. How many times have you heard Yaya Jammeh enablers claim that those who highlight his evil are bad Gambians destroying the image of “good Gambia”? How many times have Yaya Jammeh defenders gone after journalists for saying something Yaya does not like? I see some of the same people who cheered Yaya as he killed and raped our own people chastising Donald Trump for his idiocy today. Wonders surely never cease! You have issues with killings in America but killings right under your nose never bothered you enough huh? Some Yaya defenders took to calling Diaspora Gambians all sorts of names. Our current foreign affairs minister and his ilk went to the extent of physically fighting with Gambians in the USA all in defense of Yaya Jammeh, disguised as some honor-saving bravado. Man ken duma yab, they proudly proclaimed to one another, hoping Yaya noticed their false bravado.
Like the White police officer that continued to mind his business as if a Black man was not being killed right next to him, some of us should also look within us to identify the behavior of that officer within us! I mean any of you that ever denied that Yaya was killing and raping our people! Any of you that went around the world telling people how good Yaya is while claiming you know nothing about human rights violations or called the killings “unfortunate”. Any of you that defended the excesses of Yaya with some silly development projects as if the rape of one woman or the taking of one Gambian life is worthy of any development project. But I guess it’s easy to deny evil if your family member is not at the receiving end just as it was easy for that police officer to ignore George Floyd because to him, George is just another Black man. For many Gambians, Yaya was killing and raping “others” and not “ours” so it was easy to ignore or deny it. It is easier to condemn the racist police in America than to condemn the killing of your own people. Mein, give us a break. We can either choose to hold ourselves accountable for the 22-year reign of terror or we can continue to pretend as if Yaya Jammeh was our only problem. Meanwhile, let’s keep excusing and praising our ability to ignore evil in the name of some misplaced forgiving without accountability and see if it takes us anywhere!