Gambian Women’s Struggles through Collective Action

Women have a long history of organizing collective action in The Gambia. Between the 1970s to the 1990s, they were instrumental to The Gambia’s politics. Yet they have held no political power within its government. This paper argues that, since authorities failed to serve women’s interests, Gambian women resorted to using collective action to overcome their challenges through kafoolu and kompins [women’s grassroots organizations] operating in the rural and urban areas. They shifted their efforts towards organizations that focused on social and political change. These women’s organizations grew significantly as they helped women to promote social and economic empowerment. The women cultivated political patronage with male political leaders to achieve their goals. Political leaders who needed popular support to buttress their political power under the new republican government cash in patronage. Thus, this study relies on primary data from oral interviews. Secondary sources such as academic journals, books, and policy reports provide context to the study.


Introduction
The year 1970 marked a turning point for The Gambia because the country became a republic on April 24, 1970. 1 Gambians ceased to be subjects of Britain and became citizens of their own sovereign state, free to frame a constitution that attended to their wishes and aspirations. 2 Prime Minister Dawda Kairaba Jawara was sworn in as the country's first president soon after the announcement of results of the referendum in which seventy percent of the electorate voted for the republic. 3

Thus, Sir Farimang
Sighateh's position as Governor General ended. To secure the referendum vote for the republic in place of the monarchy, women assured the People's Progressive Party [PPP] and its leader of their support. 4 This victory could not have resulted without the political involvement of a broad network of women's grassroots organizations. 5 women helped build the new government, but from a position of political clientelism, exchange of their political support, rather than a position of political authority.

British Colonial Influence and Historical Past of Women's Organizations
British colonial rule influenced the organization of political life and culture of the people of Bathurst and by extension all Gambians. British colonialism and settlement of liberated Africans or repatriated free slaves from the New World and the West Coast of Africa called Aku and Krio brought European education, Christianity, and foreign languages, specifically English or Krio, among the Gambian people. 14 Although Western culture seemed to dominate, it coexisted with African cultures among the indigenous settlers. This combination molded the ebb and flow of city life in colonial Bathurst.
Concurrently, Islam affected people's lifestyles. It blended with some of the existing cultural practices and cemented male hegemony in the rural areas. A colonial report in the 1940s revealed that the colonial government, in recognition of the importance of Islam, desired to have a representative of the Muslim community in the Legislative Council. But it had to choose a man from Bathurst, as there was no one in the Protectorate the inland territory with sufficient knowledge of English to follow the proceedings. 15 Therefore, levels of Western education became one of the major differences between the urban and the rural areas.
British colonial education and Christianity introduced by the missionaries influenced women's organizations. As an illustration, members of social clubs such as ladies or girls' clubs were overwhelmingly educated Aku and Creole women and girls. 16 The present study has identified two categories of kompins that emerged during the colonial era in Bathurst. One was the group comprising educated and working-class women; they were predominantly Christians. Women Contemporary Society, Gambia Women Federation, Women's Corona Society, Girl Guides, Girls friendly society, religious-based groups such as Methodist Women Association, Mother's Union, Ex Pupils' Associations, namely Methodist Girls High School [MGHS] and the Freetown Secondary School for Girls [FSSG], were examples. 17 The second category was less literate in the Western education system, and overwhelmingly Muslim. They were married women, some of them were stay-at-home mothers, while most of their membership engaged in trade at the market or homemade canteens. Members served as a support system to one another with a common value system. They embarked on local banking schemes, osusu. 18 Occasionally, they organized entertainment programs, mostly sabar, as a way of strengthening the association. 19 Before the mid-1950s, these women groups were not visible in the mainstream.
However, a few individual women were prominent in the city council politics. and girls across the country, although they began within the city before expanding their advocacy into the interior. This is because the system limited educational opportunities to Bathurst. For example, the Women Contemporary Society and Gambia Women Federation employed education as a tool deployed for the advancement of women's and girls' interests. They organized reach outs and urged parents to send their daughters to school. As a founding member of the above organizations, Busy Bees and Women's Corona Society, people knew Rosamond Fowlis for her crusade in Kombo areas and provinces, encouraging parents to enroll their daughters in school. These organizations rallied women of diverse backgrounds to deliberate matters of the common good. They organized a "baby award" annually and offered incentives to mothers of the healthiest babies. 20 They sensitized the city residents on proper sanitation and hygiene, especially in underserved neighborhoods and among poor families.
Members of these organizations were predominantly teachers and nurses, and virtually all were from the Aku ethnolinguistic population. 21 22 Studying abroad gave these women a sense of understanding the struggle for self-determination and internal self-rule. These women also resisted male The rise in community service and the women's empowerment approach led these disparate categories of kompins to converge in the mid-1950s. The Gambia Women Federation extended its membership to ex. across the country. 25 By 1955 and 1956, many members of these organizations had identified with the emergent political parties through the women's wings. Whereas kompins followed a Western model of organizational structure such as the idea of girls', ladies, and gentlemen clubs because of the acculturation process influenced by the British colonial rule, kafoolu have their roots in the precolonial era, originally as traditional associations. Despite differences in their trajectories and operations, kafoolu and kompins became intertwined with the purpose of enhancing women's economic and social freedom.
The colonial system was discriminatory in its efforts to organize Gambian political life. It restricted voting to the Colony, the area of jurisdiction under the direct administration of the British colonial government, and not every woman had the right to vote. 26 First, before a woman could exercise her franchise in Bathurst, it required such potential voters to possess property and have a steady income.
Second, she had to be at least twenty-five years old at the time of election, either to vote or to run for office. Unlike the Colony, the colonial system deprived women living in the Protectorate of such legal rights or privileges as enjoyed by women that lived in Bathurst. In practical term, women in the provinces were out rightly disfranchised. Two years before introducing universal suffrage in 1960, chiefs refused female voting rights at the constitutional conference while they granted these rights to men with or without property. 27 There was disagreement between the Colony and the Protectorate's delegates over women's right to vote. Bathurst politicians were advocating for women's suffrage, but their counterparts in the Suffrage. This marked significant development in Gambian politics because, for the first time, there was equal suffrage for adult men and women without discrimination. 29 The presence of women delegates, Cecilia Moore, and Rachel Palmer from Bathurst, gave women's issues a momentum in national political debates. Two subsequent conferences continued in Georgetown and Bathurst in January and March 1959, before the suffrage ultimately took effect in 1960 following the first House of Representatives election. 30 That said, such marginalization shows an interconnectedness between the British colonial policy and indigenous patriarchal values that limited women's opportunity to take part in public life.

Path to Independence
Activism reinforced and accelerated the decolonization process of The Gambia. The press and labor leaders turned nationalist leaders were the vanguards of the campaign against colonial authority and their anti-colonial struggle played a vital role in the struggle for independence. Women journalists such as Marion Foon, Cecilia Moore, and Harriet Camara fought against colonial government anti-press laws, particularly the Newspaper Ordinance Act of 1944. This Law aimed to gag free press with an increased burden of bond and license fees. Some laws restricted private newspapers from covering stories at the Statehouse. While they opposed and exposed bad laws, they promoted women's issues Small and other nationalist leaders linked the struggle for workers' rights to the struggle for national self-determination. 33 The Workers' Unions, including dock workers, Rate Payers Association, Civil Service, and trade unions, were mobilized, and they oriented their energies towards the cause of national liberation. 34 Small's efforts culminated in the establishment of Urban Council. He advocated to expand Urban Council to the rural areas, but the governor denied this request in 1934. 35 In his advocacy for equal representation, he fought for electoral reforms to the Legislative Council and was granted in 1946. 36 Because of the paucity of material, little is known about the direct involvement of women, and to what extent they took part in these anti colonial efforts before the 1940s. Could it be that the banner of gender equality was not prioritized by anti-colonial activists who were not paying particular attention to gender disparities? Based on Small famous slogan, "no taxation without representation," it would be fair to conclude that women were his concern despite that gender equality was so naturalized in various parts of the world and more so, in The Gambia as he vied against colonial rule not only in The Gambia but also in the African continent, and elsewhere.   the traditional ruler of Egba in January 1949. The Women's Union also advocated for enfranchisement of all women in Nigeria. 46 In Guinea, in 1948, the market women defiled colonial regulation and market tax. By 1955, these women got the colonial government to reduce taxes. 47 Based on this reason, these actions led to the growing interest in self-help groups.
The formation of women's grassroots organizations in The Gambia empowered women to challenge the status quo. This is certainly true with Women's Contemporary Society and Women's Federation, two organizations that promoted political awareness and women's rights. One of the founding members of these organizations was Augusta Jawara, who became the first woman to run for a national election in In 1965, The Gambia attained independence and held its first referendum the same year. The citizens were to decide whether to change the political system from a parliamentary monarchy to a republic. 49 Women were visible in celebrations of independence as they chanted and danced on that momentous day of February 18, 1965. Almost every woman had sewn a new dress bearing the face of D.K Jawara with inscriptions such as the Gambia independence of 1965 or progress, peace, and prosperity. Since the eve of independence, women dressed in a variety of colors. Several people arrived from upriver districts to join the rest at the McCarthy Square. 50 Around midnight, the union jack was brought down and replaced by the Gambian flag; its red, white, blue, white, green colors were displayed on the flagpole while fireworks lit the sky and people sang the national anthem and liberation songs in unison. 51 It was an emotional moment as Gambians looked forward to a better future; there were tears in the eyes of some of the people. They were tears of joy, hope, freedom, and uncertainty. The weeklong celebration started three days earlier. There was jubilation everywhere, in every village and every corner of the country. 52 To honor this day, most woman stayed at home instead. As they aroused the city with a festive mood, the rural areas were also celebrating.
Nine months after The Gambia's independence, the first referendum was held on November 26, 1965.
However, it was lost because of the government's inability to achieve a two-thirds majority. 53  and unwise for the people to take total control to run the affairs of the state. Many were of the view that the country's future statehood was uncertain, and its high poverty rate would cause its failure. 54 This referendum, therefore, failed to attain the two-third majority by less than eight hundred votes.

Origins and Workings of Kafoolu
Gambian women's ability to cultivate solidarity strengthened their collectivity. Despite the hostility of the colonial environment, women contested and negotiated with the system that gagged them. Women adopted different approaches to defend their economic and political interests within the British administrative system, which led to collective action efforts by groups from various regional and ethnolinguistic origins. Bala Saho's work portrays women's sense of solidarity in the Cadi court during the colonial period; he writes, "women-built networks along kinship lines at a social gathering, and through the market." 55 One woman's success in court was a success for other women. One of such instances was the landmark case of Horrijah Jobe. 56 There is a long-standing history of women's network in rural Gambia. But to date, we have found little evidence stating exactly when kafoolu were created. By illustration, community development practitioner Njaga Jawo concedes that: We did not form kafoos; we found them there. People will claim that they form kafoos. Normally that is what people will say, but kafoos were here from days immemorial, even before we were born. What we did know is that we strengthened the kafoos and empowered them, but we found them there. So even before you and I were born, we found kafoos in our villages. 57 For Suwaibou Touray, women kafoolu emerged after independence. He claimed that the culture [farm work for prosperous families in the farming communities in return for reward] was that "it was the male and female youth who were in this culture before independence. Women's kafoos came into being later after independence, to part take in the farm work of this type or simply work for pay. It was these women kafoos that were infiltrated by politicians who then patronized them to gain their support. They borrowed this culture from the Bathurst area to the provinces changing the word kafoo to that of kompin and for Mandinka 'kompinoo." 58 According to Sulayman Touray, kompins comprised different women and men, but the members were usually within the same age bracket or generation. 59 Binta Jammeh-Sidibe and Omar B. Jallow asserted that the idea of kafoo was brought to the city by rural-urban migrants, therefore metamorphosing into the concept of kompin in Bathurst and its surroundings. 60  Jammeh-Sidibe and Touray highlighted that both women and men formed kafoolu to attain specific objectives and to address the community's needs. These necessities varied from one community or village to another. With time and a rise in population, individual kafoolu represented distinct groups and their respective identities. For example, secret societies for blacksmiths, leather workers, farmers, women groups, age grade, and weavers represented the interests of members of these occupations. 64 Mostly, in these groups, women were under the guidance of men in craftwork. In urban areas, however, women became more independent in handicraft. They created their market, where they predominantly sold to tourists. These women seemed to be more prosperous than their rural counterparts, even when they crafted similar products, such as dyed cloth and other fabrics. 65 In rural Gambia, kafoolu became a means for economic survival as women joined forces to promote their economic interests. They were created for socio-economic reasons aimed at improving members' income-generating potential by offering a support system for women's businesses and trades to become relevant actors in the informal sector of the country's economy. 66 Individual women, however, faced challenges when attempting to secure a living or profits from commercial activities. 67 By forming these groups, they exerted more pressure on local and regional leaders to protect their interests. was later created as an umbrella body. 68 Involvement in food production made many of these women breadwinners within their households. 69 They engaged in horticultural ventures and the breeding of livestock for the provincial market, lumo, and the Islamic feast locally called tobaski. These women's labor contributed to the country's economy. Still, these women's ability to shape economic policy or gain political influence remained limited and subject to male authority.

Members of
Women formed Kafoolu and their membership includes mostly women. Men, however, have a limited presence in kafoolu sometimes help women with certain labor sometimes, including fencing gardens and digging wells. These co-opted male members made up between three and five men, and they took part as associate members. 70 These men sometimes served as advisers and helped women with their records.
The members sometimes had their organizations' aims and objectives recorded in written documents.
Even when that was not the case, they agreed about their goals and know them by heart. 71 Although, there was no consensus as to when kafoolu were formed, they were instrumental in the collaborative work of their communities. Their act of voluntary service in their communities predated colonial rule. They took part in social and religious activities, such as funerals and naming ceremonies.
Members of kafoolu played a complementary role to men to clear farms, weeding, and harvesting. They worked on individual farms as a way of mutual aid to their fellow members or sometimes for cash for their labor. They partook in other duties, such as fetching water and firewood and community cleaning.
Besides cash, they received grains such as rice, corn, and millet in return for their services. Members would work on somebody's farm, such as a relatively wealthy person, very respectable individual, or successful merchants. They would also help the needy, who were incapable to work on their farm. They also involved members in other economic ventures such as soap making and cloth dying to support themselves. 72

Political Partnership of Women and Political Leadership
Gambian in the country's history. 74 During this election, the major parties were UP and the PPP. The leader of UP Pierre S. Njie, who was also the Chief Minister, gained the support of the chiefs. 75 The PPP, however, embarked on face-to-face campaign and concentrated on the farmers' support. 76 From this date onwards, the PPP came to symbolize with rural population who were legally excluded from national political scene by the colonial government.
Kafoolu and kompins provided resources and support for political parties. These supports included financing feedings of supporters during party meetings, hiring vehicles to voting centers during elections and purchasing a party designed T-shirts for supporters. This practice is still in existence. As shown previously, women's collective action led political parties to recognize their potential local influence and seek the support of women's organizations during elections. Kompins became political allies with GMC, UP and PPP who sought to work with these women groups. They directly linked with women's wing of political parties led by yai kompins. In other word, a yai kompin literary means "mother of association" but technically referring to a leader or a representative. They have played mentorship roles among community members and have made sure that members recognize the need to take part in development work. Through these activities, they have become a strong mobilization force instrumental to politics.
Most interviewees agreed that post-menopausal women assume the position of yai kompins. These women were eloquent, relatively "wealthy," and from "important" families and traits that propelled them to a position of leadership. Many were the wives or daughters of important men, such as politician, an imam, alkaloo or successful trader themselves. 77 They are opinionated, skillful individuals who worked to expand their organization's political engagement with a diverse national population. Women's grassroots organizations endorsed and canvassed votes for their candidates during elections because voters listened to them. They sometimes supported the political goals of men close to them. Also, they hired vehicles to transport voters to polling stations. 78 Kafoolu and kompins embarked on fundraising and persuasion, facilitating political conversations and local diplomacy. They collaborated with the Women's Bureau; an institution put in place by the Gambia government to investigate policies concerning women issues. It aimed to promote women in national development. 79 Through them, politicians could collaborate with urban and rural women for political gains. Much of that influence was also the product of the effective advocacy of these women. Using contributions of their members, women's organizations supplemented the organization and entertainment efforts of political parties and candidates, providing asobee, food, water, and drinks for their political gatherings. 80 African women's collective action was instrumental to liberation struggles across the continent. Scholars such as Filomina Chioma Steady, Susan Geiger, Deborah Pellow, Elizabeth Schmidt and Ampofo Akosua Adomako have examined the way women's political participation transformed societies and the roles movements played either in societal success or failure. 81 Geiger describes women as being 'neglected' despite their efforts and linked this constraint to patriarchy. These scholars hold the view that African women's political participation diminished after independence because of illiteracy. 82 The findings of the present study, however, suggest that women's grassroots organizations were significant political actors despite their illiteracy.
Kafoolu and kompins have increased women's political engagement through the organization of political activities. 83 Their pivotal role in the 1970 referendum emblematizes their achievement of political influence at a decisive moment in Gambian history. During the change to a republican government, Prime Minister Jawara faced massive opposition after his administration held the referendum. But in October 1969, women in Saba assured Jawara that they would campaign for its success. Similarly, in Fass Chaho, women affirmed their support during Jawara's visit. 84 Women were therefore at the forefront of the PPP campaign for the republic. Gambian women were loyal followers of the PPP leader. Their position was not grounded so much on political ideology but on the notion that "God chooses a leader," more of a cheerleader role. He was charismatic and had the firm support of women. As a result, UP, which opposed the call for a republican status, failed to secure the majority vote. The success of the PPP during this referendum made many personalities from various parties to shift allegiance to the PPP. This erratic changing of loyalty speaks volume of the country's political leadership and its direction.
From all indications, the political relationship and collaboration that existed between women and the country's political leaders remained asymmetrical. These women used their resources, energy, and time, but their compensation has been inconsequential compared to their political input. They calculated politicians would work to create solutions to their problems by providing them social amenities such as markets, schools, boreholes, health centers and good roads and provide jobs for their children. By focusing their efforts on securing votes for their candidates, instead of promoting critical political debate on policy issues, women in these organizations ended up doing the bidding of political parties.
As a Prime Minister, Jawara had the authority to appoint the cabinet members of his government. All eight appointed ministers were men except Lucretia St. Claire Joof, who was nominated to the House of Representatives two years earlier. 85 In summary, the ability of these women to contribute to this referendum was connected to their extensive networks across the country, specifically the kafoolu's well-established history in the rural  Jammeh-Sidibe affirmed that her mother was a very active kafoo leader since the 1960s whose efforts and other women shaped her political orientation in serving people. Her future husband, Bakary Sidibe was also very active in politics, and he was among the founding members of PPP. Sidibe was also a kafoo leader for men. Some interviewees claimed that women even sold their valuable such as jewelries to invest in politics in the 1960s and the 1970s.