When the current Deputy Speaker of The Gambia’s National Assembly, seedy njie was exposed for his bigoted approach to government policy and hiring conduct that seeks to exclude Mandinka speaking natives, we have seen a chorus of condemnations emerging from various quarters within Gambian society. The wave of reactions reveals underlying tensions within Gambian society.

However, The Gambia’s current political tensions cannot be understood in isolation. Moments of national strain rarely emerge overnight; they are shaped by older patterns of exclusion, representation, and competition for power. If we want to understand where the country is today, we must first examine the historical forces that helped shape its political culture.

This most recent public controversy has renewed debate about ethnicity, belonging, and national leadership. But these tensions are not new. They reflect a deeper historical struggle over how the privilege to govern has been abused to determine who is left out of opportunities, and how political grievances become absorbed into the language of identity.

That story is not new. It did not begin in 2016, or even in 1994. Its roots stretch back to the late colonial period and the years surrounding independence, when debates over access, representation, and state power began to harden into long-lasting political fault lines.

At the center of that history is a simple but consequential question: how does a new nation build inclusive institutions without sacrificing competence, legitimacy, or cohesion?

From Colonial Exclusion to National Politics

For much of the colonial era, political participation in The Gambia was concentrated in the colony, which consisted of the island of Bathurst and the Kombo Saint Mary’s Division (KSMD), while the rest of the country, designated the ‘protectorate’ remained structurally marginalized. Electoral representation was limited, access to formal education was uneven, and public administration was shaped by a narrow social base. The result was not only an imbalance of power, but also a widening sense of exclusion among communities that were governed without a voice.

The introduction of universal adult suffrage in 1960 transformed that political landscape, extending representation beyond the colony and creating a new national electorate that had up to that point, remained unrepresented and voiceless. It was within this context that the Protectorate People’s Party, later the People’s Progressive Party, became a decisive political force. This shift mattered because it altered not just who could vote, but whose interests would define the future of the state and which politician or movement would command the largest support base. Public life was no longer confined to the colonial center; the wider country had entered the political arena. This shift was a clear disadvantage to the political parties and movements that existed up to that point.

Independence and the State-Building Dilemma

Independence brought optimism, but it also exposed a difficult reality: nation-building required both legitimacy and administrative competence. The pressure to rapidly “Gambianise” the civil service was understandable, especially in a newly sovereign state eager to replace colonial authority with local leadership. Yet Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara’s own account reflects the caution that guided his approach: replacing expatriates too quickly, without qualified successors, risked weakening the institutions the country depended on. His strategy was to localize state power steadily, but not recklessly. That choice was pragmatic, but it was not universally popular.

This is where historical grievance became politically significant. The colonial policy that facilitated unequal access to education meant that some groups entered the independence phase with far greater administrative experience than others. With the government being the sole employer, this meant those groups had access to employment. Communities that had helped drive mass political mobilization expected social mobility and public representation in return. When those expectations collided with the slower pace of institutional transition, resentment deepened. Over time, economic frustration and political rivalry began to take on ethnic overtones—not because identity alone determined politics, but because political exclusion is often interpreted through the identities people already inhabit.

The Long Shadow of Early Political Choices

These early choices left a long institutional and psychological legacy. Over the decades, frustrations over access, patronage, and political belonging continued to shape public life. They did not by themselves cause later crises, but they created conditions in which suspicion could be mobilized, loyalty could be ethnicized, and governance failures could be read as group-based betrayal. The attempted coup of 1981, the collapse of the First Republic in 1994, and the intense political reckoning that followed the end of Yahya Jammeh’s rule in 2016 all unfolded against that deeper historical backdrop.

Why This History Still Matters

The central lesson is clear: when society fails to confront the historical roots of exclusion, those unresolved tensions return in new forms. The Gambia’s challenge today is not simply to condemn divisive politics, but to understand the institutional history that made such politics possible. History matters because it reveals how nations inherit both their strengths and their fractures. And until that inheritance is honestly reckoned with, national unity will remain more fragile than it appears.

Sadly, for The Gambia, we have a president who has neither the interest in understanding such history, nor the capacity to address it with tact, maturity, and sensitivity. Every utterance he or his minions make with his blessing, further widens the chasm and worsens an already tenuous situation.