Knowing What I Know Now: Youth Experiences of Dictatorship and Transitional Justice in the Gambia

Abstract

This article contributes to the empirical evidence concerning the reception of transitional justice processes and the experiences of youth in contexts of authoritarian rule. It explores how eight students in the Gambia receive, perceive and experience learning about what happened in the past by watching the testimonies told at the Truth Reconciliation and Reparations Commission. Based on conversational interviews, I argue that for the students in this study, the past enters the present as rememory. By recalling their rememories, an imaginative re-construction of the Jammeh past emerges which uncovers how the biopoliticized state functioned in everyday life, how loyalty and obedience to Jammeh was indoctrinated from a young age and how children remember. By paying attention to youth’s rememories and perceptions of the revelations of truth commissions, and the meanings they attribute to these revelations, transitional justice scholars and practitioners can gain a more holistic understanding of how youth experience and make sense of transitional justice processes.