A baptismal certificate. A baseball cap. Wallets, belts, neckties and bank membership cards. At first, the ordinary-seeming items do not seem fit for display in a museum. Then, with just a few words from one of the slips of paper accompanying them, the objects’ quotidian nature takes a chilling turn. “Certificate awarded to Kanyiba Kanyl for the completion of Computer Operation course,” one note reads. “He was forcibly disappeared on 18th September 2006. His fate is still unknown.” This is Memory House, a museum located on a dusty road in Serekunda, just outside The Gambia’s capital, Banjul, dedicated to the victims of former leader Yahya Jammeh. Objects on display here range from photographs of victims to written testimony to art made by those who suffered under Jammeh’s 22-year reign in this small West African country of 2.4 million.
But just five years after Jammeh was deposed, the museum, which opened in October, pursues a mandate much grander than its small stature of just four exhibition rooms suggests: rewriting the suppressed history of Jammeh’s rule, including, in some cases, uncovering new stories for the first time. “Our target is the people who have been hearing things [about the Jammeh era] but really are not sure whether to believe it or not,” said Sirra Ndow, Gambia country representative for the African Network Against Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances, which runs Memory House. Jammeh came to power in a 1994 military coup. Over the next two decades, hundreds of Gambians, journalists, migrants, political activists, as well as student protesters and random Gambians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, would be killed or disappeared. Others were targeted in “witch hunts” and accused of sorcery. HIV patients were forced to undergo bogus, dangerous treatments. Rigged and suppressed elections kept Jammeh in power until 2016, when the political opposition was able to unite around Adama Barrow for a surprise victory.
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