Nangadef!
That is the word in the Wolof language for greeting friends.
It’s a little after 7:40 a.m. in the capital of the Gambia, and the loveliest sunrise is pouring warm, gentle gray-orange light into my hotel room. It is easily the kindest the sun has been to us since we’ve been here.
We are now well into the International Roots Festival.
We’ve seen West African culture literally paraded before us in a procession of brilliant musicians and amazing dancers performing in heat so intense that it forced me to shut down my camera multiple times.
We’ve rubbed elbows with government ministers and shaken hands with a president.
We have met the descendants of Kunta Kinteh’s family. Stood inside the ruins of the James Island fort, where perhaps nearly a million African captives were crammed together like cattle before being loaded into the holds of slave ships.
We also were on hand when it was formally renamed in honor of its most famous captive, Kunta Kinteh.
We’ve been interviewed a lot, on national radio and television. After spending four decades and change as a journalist, to be the one being interviewed is very different and more than a little unsettling, but there’s no choice but to roll with it.
But of all the impressive things we’ve experienced so far, none has been more impressive or more moving than the Gambian people themselves. Their warmth, their loving and giving spirit, is total, enough to make a jaded, cynical Westerner to believe that it’s all an act, a set-up, that you’re in the process of being hustled.
It isn’t.
How many other places in the world will a hotel employee, on your second day there, invite you to the naming ceremony for his week-old child?
Wash out your shirts in the bathroom sink before you leave your room for the day and hang them on a hanger to dry, and you return to find them perfectly ironed, folded and waiting for you in the middle of your perfectly made bed.
You don’t fill out a form for this. You don’t even ask. It’s just done.
Tell people you’re from the United States and their response is uniformly the same: “Welcome home.”
It’s not polite, pleasant rhetoric. They mean it.
You also get a lot of rasta spirit, no surprise, since Caribbean reggae music is immensely popular throughout black Africa.
(I don’t really know reggae. For those of you who do, Luciano is here.)
But perhaps even more amazing than all the endearing smiles and embraces you get are the things you don’t get — the negativity. The mistreatment of one another in word or in fact.
The poorest person here — and there are a great many of them — still conducts him or herself with the dignity of people who have known all their lives exactly who they are and what they’re about.
They have no need to advertise it or wave it like a flag. They live it.
And that’s when it hits you: There are no niggers here. No niggas, no niggaz nor any other form of the N-word.
They have no need to defend it, modify it, justify it, rationalize or apologize for it. For them, the very concept, the state of being that the word defines, does not exist here.
I’ve seen a lot of things since I’ve been here, but I’ve yet to see a Gambian refer to his fellow countryman as a “nigga” even once, nor the behvior that goes along with it. No young men with their pants sagging below their butts like fools. No lacing their speech with profanities and obscenities every other word.
You can’t imagine how refreshing, how uplifting that is.
Or maybe you can.
Likewise, I’ve yet to see a hear a young Gambian man refer to any young woman as a “bitch” or a “ho” or anything else demeaning or degrading. What I have heard is that respect for women is a longstanding part of Gambian tradition.
I can believe it, because I’ve seen it.
If the only thing I did in the Gambia was witness the dignity with which people carry themselves, the respect with which they treat one another and grace with which they face the many struggles of their daily lives, it would’ve been worth every hour and every mile it took to get here.
There’s a lot more that’s happened and a lot more to come. I’ll get more into detail when our whirlwind schedule slows down a bit And I promise to post pics as soon as I can find a faster wi-fi connection somewhere.
But whatever is ahead of us for the rest of our time here, one thing is certain. By the time I leave the Gambia, the term “African-American” will have an entirely different meaning to me than it did when I arrived.