The Architecture of Predation in The Gambia
By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
Sunday, February 15, 2026
In December, I diagnosed The Gambia’s state as a predatory system. That analysis established what the architecture is: a machinery that fuses presidential authority with sacred kingship (Mansayaa) and mystifies theft through statutes like the State Lands Act 1991. Readers of that piece know the diagnosis. What remains unanswered is how this machinery survives leadership transitions. Why does the machine outlast the man?
Our fieldwork across Kombo reveals how the architecture reproduces itself through ritual compliance. The architecture cultivates three interlocking conditions. First, engineered civic illiteracy: over forty per cent of adults cannot read gazette notices published exclusively in English. Second, cultivated innocence: the reasonable expectation that leadership means stewardship and officials act in the public interest. Third, manufactured ignorance: the state refuses to translate its own processes into accessible language and displaces ancestral knowledge as the primary record of land relations.
These conditions reflect deliberate state design and produce automatism. The official publishes the gazette knowing most cannot read it. The elder presses a thumbprint trusting the official’s explanation. Neither questions the ritual because the architecture has made questioning feel unreasonable. The impossibility of verification produces compliance without requiring belief.
Officials publish gazette notices in English that most citizens cannot read. Communities attend handover ceremonies for ancestral land allocated without free, prior and informed consent. Community elders sign compensation agreements trusting state officials, unaware they authorise permanent alienation. The farmer in Brufut assumes the man in State House would never sanction dispossession of his ancestral land. The elder in Kartong presses a thumbprint onto a document he cannot read, trusting the state official to act in the community’s interest.
When a delegation arrives at State House seeking return of dispossessed land, the architecture reframes their plea as a courtesy visit demonstrating loyalty. The community’s grievance dissolves into the panorama; what remains is performance. Neither the delegation nor the presidency need believe in this transformation: it requires only that both perform their assigned roles. The Brufut elder who assumed leadership meant stewardship now finds himself performing deference toward an office that refuses to return his clan land. No one needs to believe these acts confer legitimacy: they need only perform them. Citizens’ good faith transforms into the architecture’s most reliable fuel.
The Coastal Belt Evidence: Opacity as Design
The Coastal Belt leases of 1970 expose this mechanism with painful clarity. For years, state officials reported these documents “lost”. Their recent recovery reveals that District Authorities granted Lease P.18/1970 for Kombo North and Lease P.14/1970 for Kombo South despite owning none of the customary land they purported to lease. The Provinces Lands Act Cap 103 conferred no authority to alienate community land; District Authorities served as administrators only, while families and kabilos retained ownership. Despite SFLRAC’S requests to the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General’s Chambers, officials have not produced documentation showing landowner consent or an agency relationship authorising these Authorities to act on behalf of true owners.
The original leases describe the land solely as the “Coastal Belt 7.7 miles long and ½ mile”. They make no reference to “tourism development” or a “Tourism Development Area”. The TDA designation appears to be a later administrative invention without documented legal instrument or community consultation. Officials now administer the “TDA” as if it were a legally distinct entity, yet its origin remains undocumented. This repackaging exemplifies how the state transforms land use through bureaucratic fiat rather than transparent process. When citizens cannot trace how a “Coastal Belt” became a “Tourism Development Area”, they cannot challenge the transformation that enabled elite capture of ancestral land. The architecture depends on this opacity.
The state continues to depend on local intermediaries to execute dispossession while shielding the centre from direct accountability. This represents functional continuity with colonial indirect rule as active design. The machinery demands motion: applications arrive, gazettes publish, signatures and thumbprints collect. Individuals become conduits for a logic they neither authored nor control. To halt it requires conscious refusal, a step outside the script that few are positioned and willing to take. This is the architecture’s true innovation. It has shifted from coercion to bureaucratic routine. Dispossession now flows through what I term the automatism of allocation, where routine administrative acts produce alienation without explicit command.
The Panorama of Innocence
The panorama saturates through repetition: gazette notices multiply, ministers invoke undefined “public purposes”, and compensation arrives in sacks of cash bearing amounts that insult ancestral value. A social reality takes shape: this is how land moves, and to question it is to stand outside the community of the reasonable. The panorama depends on reciprocity: the official publishes the notice aware of the general backdrop and the elder attends the ceremony aware of the same backdrop. Neither may believe in the legitimacy they perform. Yet both assist in creating the panorama that makes the performance seem necessary.
The sacred aura surrounding presidential authority makes questioning feel like sacrilege. When a farmer in Niamina hears Mansa Kunda, he lowers his head. How could the sacred king steal? This reflexive deference transforms citizens into subjects who seek royal audience rather than demand accountable service. The cultural script forbids the question before it can form, and reverence sustains the panorama by pre-empting dissent.
The District Authority that signed the 1970 Coastal Belt leases exemplifies the automatism of allocation: an intermediary executing transactions it had no legal capacity to authorise, yet insulated from accountability by the ritual of office itself. This represents a refinement of decentralised despotism: the intermediary is no longer the colonial chief alone, but the entire bureaucratic apparatus that transforms citizens into subjects through ritual rather than force.
The Hidden Sphere and Parallel Grounds
Beneath the panorama exists another reality: unofficial yet alive in memory. Communities retain knowledge of boundaries never surrendered through free, prior and informed consent. Elders recall oral agreements whose terms differ from what state documents now assert. Ancestral ecologies retain their local names despite Anglicised labels imposed by elites. The hidden sphere operates in semi-darkness because the official panorama grants it no standing. When the Malagen report confirmed the illegal de-reservation of Karenti (“Tanji Bird Reserve”), or when Brufut documented continuous occupation despite state claims of vacancy, communities asserted truths the system has no mechanism to recognise.
Where official channels serve dispossession, communities cultivate parallel grounds where they treat land as lineage rather than inventory: participatory mapping records boundaries held in elders’ memories; community land documentation preserves indigenous place names; and spaces emerge where citizens discuss restitution as integral to justice and national cohesion rather than charity, deriving their power from embeddedness rather than separation. When Gambian colleagues lead governance through independent boards and research emerges from Community Research Advisory Groups rather than external consultants, legitimacy flows from participation in community life.
Demystification as Strategy
Dismantling this architecture requires conscious demystification: stripping the sacred aura from secular power in a postcolonial republic. We must initiate a linguistic revolution that separates the state from the shrine. This means retiring Mansa, Mansayaa, Mansa Kunda and instituting Jamaa Kunda. We must redefine the president as a Ñaatonko, a fixed-term manager accountable to the electorate. This semantic shift attacks the mythology that legitimises systemic theft.
Alongside linguistic reform, demystification demands comprehensive civic translation: equipping every Gambian with tools to decode power. We must mandate plain-language explanations of all legal notices and repurpose community forums as schools for the social contract, teaching that the state is a public instrument funded by and answerable to the people.
The Fragility of the Panorama
The panorama draws its strength from universal participation, yet that same universality contains its weakness. Every act that asserts the hidden sphere, every refusal to press a thumbprint, every insistence on indigenous names, illuminates an alternative reality. And once that alternative is visible, it threatens the very existence of the appearance it contradicts.
Our work in Kombo identifies demystifying the throne as an imperative for dismantling predation. Without this, legal reforms remain captive to the cultural architecture that legitimises theft. The National Land Policy 2026–2035 contains progressive language on customary ownership yet proposes amending rather than abolishing the State Lands Act 1991 and replacing it with a Community Land Rights Act. This reveals the system’s resilience: reforms occur at the policy level while foundational structures enabling predation remain intact.
Meaningful change begins with individuals and communities deciding they will no longer perform the ritual. Policy reform follows society’s reawakening rather than causing it. The reawakening begins in the daily, stubborn insistence that land is alive, that ancestors matter, and that truth remains possible even when power seems total. The machinery continues turning until enough people simply stop feeding it.
The architecture of predation was never designed to withstand truth. It was designed to make truth seem impossible. Our task is not to overpower the machinery but to withdraw the consent that fuels it. When enough of us decide we will no longer perform the lie; we act from fidelity to what we know to be real, and the entire panorama will shudder. We do not attack the panorama. We remember that another world has always existed beneath its surface. A world where land breathes, ancestors speak, and justice flows as restoration has never disappeared. It has only been waiting for us to stop performing the lie long enough to see it again.
Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC) is a Gambian think tank. We use community-based participatory action research to secure land rights and advocate for accountable governance and sustainable development policies.
