Gambia: Baba Musa Tarawally - His Pen Was His Power (Part 2)

analysis

With The New Gambia now turned against the party in power, libel charges followed one after the other. A huge passport scandal hit the headlines in the paper in 1968 when a diplomat serving The Gambia abroad was found trafficking in Gambian travel-documents. It blew up into a big story when criminals caught in many parts of Africa, especially in areas mining diamonds and other precious metals in Angola, the Congo and Sierra Leone were caught carrying Gambian passports. Even though there was ample evidence to show that the foreign services officer was culpable, the government chose impunity and, instead, charged and tried the editor; but sitting magistrate Edmund Njie, acquitted him. Swaebou Conateh in his Comparative Study of Laws and Court Cases Concerned with Freedom of Expression and Media Ownership and Access in Colonial and Post-Independence Gambia 1945-1985, cites a case in 1968 when Violet Rumgay, the manageress of the Atlantic Hotel in Bathurst, sued the paper charging defamatory and libellous accusations in an article on workers' gripes at the hotel. The magistrate acquitted him on nine counts but fined him a £100 on one count. According to Tarawally,no one to this day ever asked him to pay up even though he would appear again between 1967 and 1971 twice for libel in cases discontinued or were unsuccessful and twice more for contempt, both also unsuccessful.

Litigation would not stop Tarawally's political muckraking. Stubborn persistence was his formula. What he described as his 'make or break' reporting principle went beyond just scratching the surface when there was a case to investigate and report on. Some people got away with murder simply because a case would be mentioned once in the papers and everyone would soon forgot about it. But not with The New Gambia, the editor said. The paper drove an issue as long as it took to get redress.

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