“Set Alight to Her Husband’s House”: Teaching as Scholarship and Activism in the Gambian Archives

Abstract

“It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.” — Bessie Head, A Question of Power “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” — Steve Biko Speech in Cape Town, 1971 In the middle of 1951, at the start of the rainy season, a womanhunt was launched in the knotty mangroves on the shores of Bathurst, The Gambia. According to a letter sent by the Secretary of prisons, R.J.S. Pearson, to the Colonial Secretary, Ms. Haddy Dukeri had managed to escape into the marshlands where the Gambia River meets the Atlantic Ocean, but she was ultimately found and reconfined. 2 The missive penned by Pearson provides little insight into Ms. Dukeri’s plight and grave circumstances. The conditions of her confinement were deeply concerning even to colonial administrators all the way up to the colonial governor; nevertheless, little action was taken to remedy or even ameliorate the situation. What Pearson’s statement does not make known is that Ms. Dukeri was housed in a men’s prison, hundreds of kilo meters from her family. Documents reveal that she was the only woman at Mile 2, at the time an all male facility, because a female prison did not exist. She was charged with a capital offence, the details of which will be outlined shortly. Dukeri’s case was not entirely unique in the broader context of female imprisonment in British colonial Africa. 3 In many ways, this was a problem not exceptional to Bathurst, The Gambia, or British African colonies. Scholarship reveals that other territories and nations, including the United States, wrestled through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century with the issue of where and how to house