After the coup failed, the raids began. On New Year’s Day this year, FBI agents descended on a blue split-level house in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the dead of night, near Austin, Texas, they searched a million-dollar lakeside villa. Agents interrogated an activist at his house in the working-class town of Jonesboro, Georgia. At a rundown townhouse development in Lexington, Kentucky, they found the wife of a US soldier, with a refrigerator full of her husband’s favourite Gambian delicacies – dishes prepared for a triumphant homecoming and repurposed for mourning.
When the employees of Songhai Development, an Austin building firm, arrived at work on Monday 5 January, they discovered the FBI had visited their offices over the weekend and seized all the company’s computers. The company’s owner, Cherno Njie, was spending the holidays in west Africa. But Doug Hayes, who managed construction for Njie, expected his boss back at any moment – they had an apartment project that was about to face an important zoning commission hearing.
“I guess he really had a two-track mind,” Hayes said in May, with a rueful laugh, over lunch at his favourite Texas barbecue joint. “He had that going, and he also wanted to be president of the Gambia.”
By the end of that Monday, Njie’s name was all over the international news. He had been arrested as he got off a plane at Dulles international airport near Washington DC, and charged with organising a failed attempt to overthrow Yahya Jammeh, the military ruler of the Gambia, a slender riverine nation of fewer than 2 million people. One alleged co-conspirator, a Gambian who had served with the US army, had already confessed to US investigators, telling them he was one of a small group of men from the diaspora who had taken part in a botched nighttime attack in December on Jammeh’s residence.
The outcome was disastrous, both for the men involved and for the long-suffering citizens of the Gambia. But back in America, it played as a weird, farcical tale. “Meet The Man Who Wanted To Rule The Gambia”, read the headline on a Buzzfeed news story, above a photo from Njie’s LinkedIn profile. The alleged coup plotters were middle-aged immigrants, who had made good lives for themselves in America over the course of decades, with careers, wives, children, savings, suburban houses, citizenship – the whole archetypal dream. They only visited the Gambia occasionally, if at all, and they had little connection to politics in their homeland. What could have possessed them to risk everything in a foolhardy attempt to topple one of the world’s strangest dictators?
Jammeh is a tyrant out of caricature, a throwback to the African strongmen of the 1970s. He’s boasted that he will rule for “a billion years”. He’s adopted a ridiculous string of titles: “His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr Yahya AJJ Jammeh Babili Mansa.” (The last phrase translates to “conqueror of rivers”.) He’s posed as a fetishistic healer, claiming magical powers to cure Aids, asthma and diabetes, and has launched witch-hunts to root out enemy sorcerers. He’s deployed demagoguery against human rights groups, fanning popular hatred of gays, whom he has threatened to behead. He’s massacred protesters and disappeared political opponents. Through his feared intelligence service, he exercises crushing power over every aspect of the Gambia’s politics and economy, which subsists mainly on income from discount tourism and peanuts.
The Gambia Freedom League, as the would-be liberators called themselves, sought to oust Jammeh with about a dozen fighters and small arms they had smuggled into the country. They didn’t get very far. When they charged at the presidential mansion, expecting support from covert allies inside, they were met instead with a volley of bullets. At least four were killed. Criminal complaints subsequently filed by US federal prosecutors underscored the ironic distance between the aims of the commando plan and its amateurish execution. Some conspirators knew each other only by code names like “X” and “Fox”. Documents were kept in a manila folder marked “Top Secret”. Njie, identified as the leader and financier, allegedly possessed a spreadsheet budgeting for equipment such as sniper rifles (“NOT really necessary but could be very useful”), along with a manifesto titled Gambia Reborn: A Charter for Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy and Development.
In Texas, where Njie was a well-known player in the business of building government-subsidised housing for the poor, the news met with astonishment. “I mean, Cherno was going to overthrow a government?” said Don Bethel, an estate agent who previously served as the chairman of the board overseeing the state housing department. “It’s serious for him, but you kind of laugh – good gosh!”
“I think he got caught up in delusions of grandeur,” Hayes said. “Even if you’re successful …. Congratulations, now you’re the president of the Gambia.”
There was one place, though, where the overthrow attempt made perfect sense, and its failure was lamented as a tragedy – where the conspirators were not derided as bunglers, but lauded as freedom fighters. That place was Facebook. The Gambia’s overseas diaspora amounts to maybe 70,000 people worldwide, and the Census Bureau estimates that only around 11,000 live in the United States. But what the diaspora lacks in numbers, it makes up for in organisation and the volume of its dissent, which rings across social networks and tinny internet radio stations. As soon as gunshots broke out in Banjul, the Gambia’s capital, the diaspora’s online forums filled with rumours and rejoicing. When the coup was foiled, the community posted prayers, poems and bellicose tributes, including a video dedicated to the fallen, linked by a Facebook user who goes by the name Gambian Sniper.
“It is Yahya Jammeh who is responsible for THIS FIGHT and YES … FIGHT IS WHAT YOU HAVE ON YOUR HANDS Yahya Jammeh,” read another widely circulated post, by a Gambian activist living in Seattle. “While we celebrate the lives of our gallant citizens who took the fight to your doorsteps, we are regrouping, resharpening our pens, reorganising for the next phase.”
Since January, that fight has largely been focused on a court case in Minnesota, where federal prosecutors have charged five Gambians with violating the Neutrality Act, a seldom-invoked 1794 law that makes it illegal to mount a military expedition against “any foreign prince or state” with whom the US is at peace. It is not difficult to see why the American government would be interested in discouraging citizens from attempting freelance regime change. But the diaspora has rallied to the defence of its “truly courageous and patriotic sons”, as one crowdfunding campaign called them – organising events like a protest in front of the Justice Department in Washington against the “tyrant appeasing charges”.
The coup attempt has focused attention on an obscure corner of US foreign policy, demonstrating the lengths to which America will go to maintain stable relations in volatile west Africa – even if it means occasionally mollifying a cruel and autocratic buffoon. And while much of the prosecution’s evidence is still obscured by secrecy, the case has already revealed much about the ideals and motivations of the men who sought to topple Jammeh, who regarded their fight as a struggle for democratic values. Some of them had served as soldiers in American wars abroad. The key mobiliser, Njaga Jagne, was a veteran officer who did two tours in Iraq.
The coup plot, years in the making, was not the work of a single mastermind, but rather a collaborative effort that germinated within the activist ecosystem. The same technological tools that facilitated democratic speech and debate also allowed a hardcore handful to rally around a radical idea: that words were no longer sufficient, and violent change was possible. They saw themselves as Americans, pursuing American ideals, with American guns. Some now face prison sentences. Others paid a higher price.
