Statecraft & Independence
Landmark
Yahya Jammeh
born 1965
Seized power at twenty-nine and ruled The Gambia for twenty-two years
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the The Gambia Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
A lieutenant who took power in a bloodless coup in 1994 and held it for twenty-two years, remaking the country around himself — and then, in 2017, became one of very few African rulers to be forced out by a ballot he had not expected to lose.
Yahya Abdul-Aziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh was born at Kanilai in the Foni district, joined the Gambian National Gendarmerie at twenty, and trained in the United States. He was a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant when he and three other junior officers overthrew Dawda Jawara on 22 July 1994 without a shot being fired, ending the longest unbroken run of multiparty government in Africa.
He ruled for twenty-two years, winning four elections, and built a state around his own person — the country's television station, its university, its main hospital, an airport terminal, roads and a deep-water port were all established or expanded under him, in a country that had had very little of any of it and almost no manufacturing. The University of The Gambia opened in 1999; before it, Gambians who wanted a degree left.
No account of The Gambia in the past half century can be written without him: he is the pivot between the Jawara republic and the present one, and he shaped the institutions, the grievances and the political vocabulary the country is still working with.
He lost the December 2016 election to Adama Barrow, conceded on television, then reversed himself a week later and declared the result void. West African troops massed at the border under an ECOWAS mandate, and in January 2017 he flew into exile in Equatorial Guinea. The transition that followed — and the reckoning with what his rule had done — is the central fact of Gambian politics today.
He ruled for twenty-two years, winning four elections, and built a state around his own person — the country's television station, its university, its main hospital, an airport terminal, roads and a deep-water port were all established or expanded under him, in a country that had had very little of any of it and almost no manufacturing. The University of The Gambia opened in 1999; before it, Gambians who wanted a degree left.
No account of The Gambia in the past half century can be written without him: he is the pivot between the Jawara republic and the present one, and he shaped the institutions, the grievances and the political vocabulary the country is still working with.
He lost the December 2016 election to Adama Barrow, conceded on television, then reversed himself a week later and declared the result void. West African troops massed at the border under an ECOWAS mandate, and in January 2017 he flew into exile in Equatorial Guinea. The transition that followed — and the reckoning with what his rule had done — is the central fact of Gambian politics today.
- Wikipedia — Yahya Jammeh
- Wikipedia — Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission
- Wikidata — Yahya Jammeh
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