DAILY OBSERVER REDUX: THE RISE AND RUIN OF GAMBIA’S GREATEST NEWSPAPER
By Kebeli Demba Nyima, Atlanta, GA
Long before the Daily Observer became the country’s flagship press, there were other attempts at journalism. The Nation, The Point, The Gambia News Bulletin, and a few party mouthpieces appeared and disappeared like the morning mist. But none of them changed the air of the newsroom quite like the Observer did. When it arrived in 1992 under Kenneth Best, the place smelled of fresh ink, hot wax, and damp newsprint. The newsroom was half-mad, half-holy. It was a shrine where typewriters rattled like machine guns, paste-up artists cut columns with surgical blades, and editors barked copy orders over the din of ceiling fans and the distant rumble of the rotary press.
For many of us who lived through those days, the Observer was not just a paper but a ritual of national awakening. You’d find it everywhere, folded neatly under the arms of schoolteachers, read aloud in attaya vous, passed from hand to hand on the ferry, or hanging like a flag from the stalls of street vendors. It was the voice that made even the timid clerk or the market woman feel part of something larger, a republic that could read itself.
Merely holding the Daily Observer in one’s hands gave an aura of intellect, a stamp of seriousness. There were unlettered traders who bought it not to read but to display, to appear enlightened. I recall visiting Ousman Ceesay of Kerewan Sound and Salifu Jaiteh of SK Trading at the Albert Market, both businessmen without formal schooling, yet each kept neat stacks of Observer copies on their desks. When I lunched at Ceesay’s home on Spalding Street in 2000, I teased his children, Lamin and Fatou, that their father must be a scholar, for only an intellectual reads The Observer at breakfast.
What made the paper the best-seller it was lay in its people, a formidable cast of reporters, editors, columnists, and cartoonists. The bylines rolled like scripture: Cherno Baba Jallow, Alieu Badara Sowe, Pa Nderry Mbai, Chief Ebrima Manneh, Lamin Drammeh, Gladys Bojang and Pa Ousman Darboe. Editors like Sheriff Bojang Snr, Baba Galleh Jallow, Demba Ali Jawo, Paschal Eze, and Ndey Tapha Sosseh gave the paper its pulse. Columnists such as Lamin Cham, Eric Oriji, Obizior Williams, Stephen West (Harmattan), Bankole Thompson, and Rohey Samba furnished its mind. Cartoonists like Musa Camara and Papa Ebrima Colley gave it humour and sometimes a headache.
Among the unsung heroes of the Observer were the photographers, the quiet chroniclers who captured the country’s pulse through their lenses.
Pa Modou Njie was the very image of a Ndongo Banjul, city-born, soft-spoken, and effortlessly stylish. Though he came from a well-to-do Banjul family, he carried himself with the humility of a tradesman. Each morning, he would stroll to Bakau Garage opposite the National Centre for Arts and Culture, camera slung over his shoulder, waiting patiently for a taxi van to take him to the Observer office at Saint Mary’s Junction. Pa was the kind of photographer who treated every assignment like a civic duty. He had an instinct for framing the human story: a child peering through a classroom window, a minister caught mid-speech, a fisherman returning home at dusk. Simple, easy-going, yet always dressed to impress, Pa Modou’s charm lay in his quiet professionalism. He had none of the arrogance of the press photographers who came later. He let his pictures do the talking.
Sadibou Jadama, the head of the photography section, was not only a photographer, he was the imam of the Daily Observer mosque. His small office beside the Editor’s room was a sanctuary of calm amid the newsroom’s daily storm. Reporters who felt out of place among the shouting and the chit-chat would slip into Sadibou’s corner for quiet reflection or refuge. I remember young journalists like Ebrima J.T. Kubaji, also known as JT Brown, often hiding there to write their articles.
Sadibou was a gentle man of faith but also a storyteller in his own right. Many mistook him for the other Sadibou Jadama, the Gambian-Swedish journalist who occasionally contributed opinion pieces to the Observer. That confusion often worked in his favour. The Swedish Sadibou used to visit the newsroom whenever he was on holiday in The Gambia. He was fond of a certain typesetter, Aja Sarga Mbaye, and the two became inseparable. Whenever he visited her at the Observer, he would drop by the newsroom, shake hands with the reporters, and slip a few dalasis into the palms of the broke and the brave. The day he arrived, the newsroom suddenly brightened; laughter flowed, and between the two Sadibous, one a devout imam, the other a flamboyant European journalist, the Observer found both piety and panache.
Then there was Pa Samba Ceesay, a native of Panchang, who began as a photographer and later turned reporter. In those years, the Observer seemed to run on Ceesays, a brotherhood within the building. Hassoum Ceesay was the editor, Madi Ceesay the reporter, Pa Malick Ceesay another reporter, and Pa Samba floated between them, part journalist, part cameraman. The Observer of the early 2000s still had teeth then, still had the courage to bite when truth demanded. And men like Pa Samba made sure that the pictures bit as hard as the headlines.
The photographers were the newsroom’s conscience. They saw what others missed. They stood under the sun for hours, cameras at the ready, while reporters covered their beats. When the presses finally rolled, their names seldom appeared in the bylines, but their work carried the weight of the truth, because a story without a picture was like a sermon without scripture, incomplete and unconvincing.
Down in the basement, beside the pressroom where the rotary machines thundered and the scent of oil, ink, and newsprint filled the air, was another world, quieter but no less essential. It was the Accounts Department, the unseen engine where idealism met arithmetic and passion was translated into payroll.
The department was manned by a cast of characters every reporter remembers with affection, and the occasional groan. Modou Boye, the ever-dignified paymaster, ruled that dimly lit office like a benevolent banker. He signed your claims with quiet ceremony, each stroke of his pen a small act of mercy. Musa Krubally, always cheerful, was the bridge between the cashbox and the chaos upstairs, his laughter echoing through the concrete corridor even on deadline nights. Yasin Faal, meticulous and motherly, kept the ledgers clean, the records flawless, and the boys in check. Fente Baldeh, a man of few words but a master of figures, handled the accounts with the patience of a tailor threading a needle.
Every Friday, the narrow stairwell leading to the basement filled with the sound of footsteps, reporters descending to claim their transport and coverage allowances. The air was warm, heavy with ink, and punctuated by the steady hum of the standby generator, which rumbled day and night whenever NAWEC plunged the city into darkness. Many times, stories were written and plates were printed by the faint yellow light of emergency bulbs, the building trembling slightly each time the generator coughed to life.
There was always some drama, a misplaced form, a missing signature, or a late claim from a reporter stranded in Brikama. But in the end, Modou Boye would sigh, reach into the petty-cash drawer, and hand over the envelope with his familiar warning: “Next time, bring your receipts.”
The basement was more than an office; it was a refuge from the frenzy upstairs. When tempers flared in the newsroom or headlines went to war with deadlines, many slipped downstairs for a moment of calm. Down there, among the ledgers and typewritten vouchers, the heartbeat of the paper thumped steadily. The pressmen oiled the rollers, the generator hummed like a tired old beast, and the first sheets of newsprint began to spool. Between the rhythmic growl of the machines and the chatter of the accountants, the Observer’s survival was negotiated line by line, dalasi by dalasi.
For all the brilliance above, it was these men below who kept the paper breathing. They ensured that the lights stayed on, the ink kept flowing, and the reporters, hungry, hopeful, and perpetually broke, could live to write another day. In the grand anatomy of the Observer, the basement was its bloodstream, and the Accounts Department its steady pulse.
If the newsroom was the brain and the accounts the heart, then the sales and distribution team were the arteries, pumping life into every corner of the country. It was they who carried the Observer from the clatter of Saint Mary’s Junction to the shopfronts of Farafenni and the kiosks of Soma.
Sales and Distribution was headed by Sorrie B. Danso, who ensured that the Observer reached every office and corner of the country. He was assisted by his lieutenant, Lamin Kujabi, a man of uncommon energy and rare urbanity. To call him a salesman is to understate his genius. Lamin was part diplomat, part businessman, part missionary. Clean-cut and always immaculately dressed in pressed shirts and polished shoes, he had a calm charm that opened doors in the most unlikely of places.
He had what one might call a newspaperman’s instinct. He understood that journalism did not end at the editor’s desk; it only began there. “A story unread,” he used to say, “is a story untold.” He made sure every edition found its reader, every headline met its audience, and every word travelled beyond the capital’s chatter.
More sales meant more circulation, and more circulation meant more advertising, the lifeblood of the paper’s economic health. He understood the heritage he was part of. The distribution of newspapers in The Gambia had always been a test of endurance, from the Nation vans that once sputtered across the countryside to the Point boys pedalling through Serekunda with morning editions. Lamin professionalised the craft. He built a system, meticulous, efficient, and humane. Vendors respected him, readers trusted him, and editors relied on him.
By dawn, his team, young boys with inky hands and bright ambitions, would already be sorting bundles by destination. Some would head to Albert Market, others to Basse, and the rest across the river. It was Lamin’s men who made sure that the Observer was not just a Banjul paper but a national habit, a living conversation between the coast and the hinterland.
He was, in every sense, the courier of the Gambian conscience. When the first copies hit the stands and the smell of newsprint filled the air, that was Lamin’s signature, his unseen byline written in distribution ink. Without him and his boys, the Observer would have been merely an idea, eloquent but unseen, brilliant but unread.
And then there was Private Eye, a ghostly pen that wrote with wit and venom. Nobody ever saw her, but everyone read her. She dissected everything from politics to fashion, from corruption to the comedies of Banjul society. For years, readers whispered about who she was. Some said it was a woman from an old Aku family in Banjul, Buju Peters, a sharp-eyed matron who wrote with the polish of a London columnist and the fearlessness of a revolutionary. Private Eye was her pseudonym, her shield, her mask of courage.
The irony, of course, was that her name was an oxymoron. She was no private eye; she was the public eye. She held the powerful to ridicule, peeled away the hypocrisy of the elite, and wrote about every subject under the sun: politics, society, manners, marriage, gossip, even the tragedy of our collective pretence. Hers was the voice of the reader who refused to be fooled.
In her prose you could hear echoes of the great Victorian weeklies, the sting of Punch, the wit of The Spectator, the knowing wink of the old gossip sheets. Yet, in the heart of Banjul, she wrote alone, perhaps from a veranda facing the sea, her tea cooling beside a typewriter that never betrayed her identity. Only two columnists ever matched her stamina: Sheriff Bojang Snr and Harmattan.
Sheriff was a man of many faces, entertainment columnist, critic, essayist, poet, and the creator of Bantaba, that famous corner where everyone who was someone wished to be featured, from tycoons to politicians to diplomats. He also created the What’s On column, covering concerts, films, and cultural soirées long before arts journalism became fashionable.
And then there was Harmattan, Stephen West, an old British retiree who had come to The Gambia to enjoy his pension and the warmth of the tropics, but wrote as if he had been born in the alleys of Half Die and raised on attaya fumes. He brought to the Observer a language so alive it could make even a menu sound like a sermon. He introduced food and drink journalism to the Gambian press, mixing humour and culinary adventure with the flair of a novelist. One week he wrote of colonialism and modernism, the next of tourism, literature, rap, music, or film. There was no subject too grand or too trivial for him. He could review a play one day and denounce a dictator the next. Together, he and Sheriff made the Observer feel like a full university in print, a place where the arts, the streets, and the state collided.
The Observer newsroom was a republic of noise and nerves. You would find Musa Camara hunched over his sketchboard, Sheriff Bojang Snr dictating headlines that thundered, and young reporters racing to Bakau or Brikama with notebooks soaked in sweat. There was no internet then, only instinct and stubborn pride. Paste-up artists worked late into the night, sticking strips of copy onto layout boards with hot wax, while the pressmen downstairs waited for the final plates to roll. By midnight, the air was thick with the smell of oil, metal, and newsprint, that peculiar perfume of a newspaper being born.
And then there was Papa Ebrima Colley, the newsroom’s jester-philosopher, the self-appointed guardian of absurdity. He joined as an intern cartoonist, always with charcoal-stained fingers and a grin that meant mischief. Under Musa Camara’s cautious eye, he learned to draw before he learned to write. But somewhere along the way, Papa decided he was an essayist, and that was the beginning of our collective migraine.
He began to write these endless Inside Gambia columns, paragraphs without direction, metaphors without mercy. We joked that if you read Papa’s piece backwards, it made just as much sense. Yet he kept at it, undisturbed, humming like a griot possessed by caffeine. But that was the charm of the Observer; it made room for madness. We had poets who became reporters, preachers who became sub-editors, and cartoonists who fancied themselves philosophers. From that chaos came courage.
It was in those pages that Gambians first read real investigative pieces, biting satire, and fearless opinion. The Observer did not always get it right, but it had the nerve to try. It annoyed governments, infuriated ministers, and comforted the oppressed. It was a paper that stood upright when others crawled.
Now, when I stumble upon an old copy, browned by time, its headlines faded but proud, I feel a pang that is half nostalgia, half grief. The Observer may be gone, its presses silenced, but its ghosts still wander the streets of Banjul. They whisper in the ears of every reporter who dares to ask a hard question: write, even if it costs you.
Kebeli Demba Nyima is a Gambian scholar based in Atlanta, Georgia. The views expressed in this article are entirely his and do not necessarily represent any organisation with which he may be affiliated.
