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Excerpts from the autobiography:
Sunday, 24 April 2011 14:27
Born Rebel; Born Gainako: The interesting life story of an African HippieBy Mathew K Jallow
Chapter 5: The Turning Point
The tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22nd 1963 was my first real introduction to America. Prior to that, America was just one of many country names I learnt at school; a name that rarely piqued my interest. Like most high school student’s who lived in one of the former British colonies in West Africa at that time, England was where I wanted desperately to visit. It was where I hoped to continue my higher education. But President Kennedy’s assassination on that fateful November morning changed all that. In Banjul, then Bathurst, the capital city of The Gambia, the solemnity of the day of the assassination thousands of miles away in the State of Texas was palpable everywhere one looked. The small dusty city of fifteen thousand people turned into a ghost-town as news of President Kennedy’s assassination spread like wildfire. At the Catholic boarding facility where I lived and attended high school, the tragedy was amplified by the fact that the
missionaries, like the murdered American president, were of Irish descent. The tribal instincts of the Catholic missionaries kicked into full gear, and with schools closed for the next two days, it appeared as if the whole city was in a mourning the like of which I had never before seen. The intensity of the sadness on that day added to the mystic and the intrigue of President. Kennedy. Even though I was too young to understand the politics of the time, President Kennedy’s death opened up a whole new vista of life in my early years; a world in which the only thing that mattered until that point, was the Catholic oriented Santa Maria Boys social club I belonged to; the new friends I made in and out of school far from home; and the mother and younger siblings I left behind in my rural village nestled amidst the Niamina low-country deep in the Gambian hinterland. Not a day went by that I did not think nostalgically about my village; the boys my age who I played with; the huge shady mango tree where we often played and fought pitched battles; our family’s large cattle herd, which I bragged about every opportunity that I had; and the nightly wrestling matches the youth from the surrounding villages regularly organized. In the days and weeks following President Kennedy’s assassination, children’s and young adult’s books about his life’s story suddenly appeared around town. My favorite was a sketched biographical edition about his heroic exploits during World War 11, when he saved the lives of his capsized patrol-boat crew in the South-Pacific war theatre. Kennedy’s captivating good looks and bravery in war created an intense desire for me to learn more about him. I began to read everything I could lay my hands on about the Kennedy dynasty and by extension; America itself. The genesis of my fascination with America was born. Over the next years, as many boys my age continued to desire to one day go to London, England to pursue higher education, my mind was slowly gravitating towards New York and America. And the more I was exposed to and learnt about American history and current affairs, the more I became fascinated with the country. In so many ways, the story of America as exemplified by the tragic assassination of President Kennedy, yet in a strange way, that tragedy did not seem to dampen my almost growing mystical fascination with the country. And as time crept on unhindered by the forces of nature, the stories of abundant wealth and great opportunities for education, which symbolize America, also revealed the horrifying stories of oppression and cruelty against American blacks. A consciousness of same evil that took the life of President Kennedy and treated black Americans as second class citizens in their own country, slowly entered into my consciousness. I struggled desperately with the knowledge of the pain black Americans were going through, and found a sanctuary of hope in The Black Panther Party and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) movements. For me these organizations could have been God’s answer to the suffering inflicted on blacks in their own country. And Stokely Carmichael fiery oratory at Crab Island School auditorium years later was an even higher level of education about the life of black in American most of us never before heard of. Gradually, I began to form views about America that tormented my spirit and bothered imagination. The images of burly, mean looking, out-of-shape white police officers brutalizing black people in the south, haunted me. I could not erase the violent images from my memory and no matter how hard I tried, they kept creeping back into my consciousness, effortlessly and unsolicited. America became a paradox where the good and bad co-existed in a severely distressing and destructive tension; one country, two different faces; one angelic, the other murderous and diabolical. At that age, the concept of racial discrimination made no sense to me. I could not understand its rationale. Yet America’s irreconcilable irony failed to dampen my intense desire to go there. I was apprehensive of-course, but the desire to go there far outweighed the fear of how as a black kid from Africa, I would be treated.
As it would turn out, my first overseas trip out of The Gambia was to Europe; Norway to be more precise, a country that never captured my imagination up to that point. I had arrived in Norway in the summer of 1970. My host, an aging World War II navy Admiral, Herr Herman Christiansen, was a genial man with an easy smile and charming manners. We met on the HMS Lady Wright while on a boat tour to Basse in The Gambia, a tour in which I was the tour guide. HMS Lady Wright was the last of the great ships that sailed weekly to the opposite ends of the country carrying goods and passengers between Basse and Banjul, before the construction of the highway. The tourism industry in The Gambia was in its infancy, with only the Atlantic and Adonis Hotels, and most tourist visitors came from Scandinavia. An incident on one of my boat tours from Basse to Banjul with a group twenty tourists brought me into close contact with the old World War II admiral Herr Christensen. But after two weeks holidaying in The Gambia, Herr Christiansen returned to Norway. Like many other tourists I had escorted to places of historical and cultural interest around the country, I did not expect to hear from him again. But much to my surprise, I received a piece of mail at our old Atlantic Hotel Vingressor Tours offices. At first, I had no idea who the mail was from and was pleasantly surprised when I realized it was the old navy admiral I met on the MV Lady Wright. It started a long friendship that would eventually take me to Norway. In Norway, I was introduced to American culture and way of life through television, which we did not have in The Gambia at that time. My television experience consisted of religiously watching two television shows “I Love Lucy” and “Gun Smoke,” every evening after work harvesting tomatoes and cucumbers at a farm in Holmestrand north of Oslo. When I returned to Oslo at the end of the summer, I began to hang out and socialization with groups of young, long-haired, dirty-looking and care-free American kids my age, whose invasion of Europe, Norway, and the city of Oslo, would later have a profound impact on my life. At first the only thing I had in common with these Yankee kids was the language of English; as we both struggled with our Norwegian language skills. Like many Norwegian university students of my age, the American hippies’ free-spirited and uninhibited lifestyle appealed to me, and before long, I was swept off my feet by the call of history. I traded my regular clothes for military fatigues, donned on a black Che Guevara cap, let my hair grow into an Afro-look, and often left the comfort of my campus bed-room for nights on King Olav’s Palace grounds at the end of Johannesgata in the center of Oslo. My transition from a clean-cut regular kid to a hippie was rapid. I had succumbed to the allure of life outside the boundaries of the social norms of the day. My transition into the life of a hippie obsessed with the radical counter-culture message and Rock N Roll was complete. The signature anti-establishment hippie lifestyle was a natural fit for me. For a mind that was inclined to rebel against established norms long before I set foot in Norway, I did not need convincing to jump on the counter-culture bandwagon. The counter-culture philosophy and message spoke to me, and trying to convince me to rebel against authority was like preaching to the choir. Back home few years earlier, I was expelled from college for my role in instigating the most destructive riot in the college’s history. That and my other anti-authority exploits was a point of pride for me. I talked about it with gusto and exhilaration joy. At first I bragged about it as a way to fit in the counter culture movement that was pervasive on the streets of Oslo. It was a certificate of honor that gave all the rights of a proud hippie. Soon everything would have meaning in my life; and the loud annoying sound of Rock N Roll music projected the intellectual sophistication of our generation, even while the lyrics shaped our thoughts and bent our minds towards a more enlightened social direction. Early on, my favorite groups were The Steppenwolf; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and the British bluesman John Mayall, who I met thirty years later in Madison, Wisconsin. The wild side of the Rock N’ Roll music scene turned on my rebellious side and allowed my anti-establishment imagination run wild. With the musical lyrics and the Rock N Roll culture, came a more profound understanding of the civil rights struggles that threatened to tear America apart. The socially pristine America of my youthful imagination slowly crumbled into the mysterious darkness of a brutal world I could neither understand nor conceptualize. The only thing I had left was try to make sense of the great paradox and the even greater contradiction that was America. The fairy-tale country of military might, abundant wealth and creative genius at the end of the beautiful rainbow was not the heaven that I had imagined after all. Rather, it was a country where hell existed for many black people, who could find no peace in their lives in their own country. For a nomadic Fulani cattle-herder from the mosquito infested marshlands of my native Gambia, the contradictions of America were difficult to reconcile.
Coming soon; a special biographical sketch: The Tragic story of Yahya Jammeh the maniacal Village dictator, 1994 to 2011
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Comments
I'm beginning to feel quite sorry for him.
From one fellow hippie to another..
I like this piece.
All you need is Love?
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