Waiting and political transitions: anticipating the new Gambia

Abstract

In early 2016, the Gambia experienced an unexpected political transition when the long-term autocrat Yahya Jammeh left the country and was replaced with a democratically elected president. This article examines this transition and its aftermath from the perspective of waiting. It addresses what happened after the waiting was over – after Jammeh had left. It uses the twin ideas of resignation and resentment, primarily in relation to ethnicity, to describe how waiting is extended pasts its original endpoint. In doing so, the article draws a contrast between the teleological assumptions of much of the transitional justice and political transition literatures and distinguishes between the transactional waiting often discussed in the anthropological literature and the transitional waiting seen in the Gambia.

Début 2016, la Gambie a vécu une transition politique inattendue lorsque l’autocrate longtemps au pouvoir, Yahya Jammeh a quitté le pays et a été remplacé par un président élu démocratiquement. Cet article examine cette transition et ses suites du point de vue de l’attente. Il traite de ce qui a eu lieu une fois la période d’attente terminée – après le départ de Jammeh. Il emploie les idées sœurs de résignation et de ressentiment, tout d’abord en relation avec l’ethnicité, pour décrire comment l’attente dépasse son point final d’origine. En cela, l’article établit un contraste entre les postulats téléologiques de la majorité de la littérature sur la justice de transition et la transition politique et fait une distinction entre l’attente transactionnelle souvent discutée dans la littérature anthropologique et l’attente de transition vue en Gambie.

Keywords:

• the Gambia
• political transitions
• transitional justice
• resentment
• resignation

Mots clés:

• Gambie
• transition politiques
• justice de transition
• ressentiment
• résignation

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the workshop on ‘Waiting in Africa’ at Bayreuth University, and I am grateful to all participants for their comments and to the organizers (Valerie Hänsch, Serawit Debele, and Michael Stasik) for the invitation and their comments on subsequent versions. Jennifer Ashley read the entire article and gave further comments. I am also grateful to the reviewers and editors for suggestions for refinement. Finally, I thank all the Gambians whose words inform this analysis. Any errors of fact or analysis remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Niklas Hultin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5315-6429