Waiting and political transitions: anticipating the new Gambia

Abstract

In early 2016, the Gambia experienced an unexpected political transition when the long-term autocrat Yahya Jammeh left the country and was replaced with a democratically elected president. This article examines this transition and its aftermath from the perspective of waiting. It addresses what happened after the waiting was over – after Jammeh had left. It uses the twin ideas of resignation and resentment, primarily in relation to ethnicity, to describe how waiting is extended pasts its original endpoint. In doing so, the article draws a contrast between the teleological assumptions of much of the transitional justice and political transition literatures and distinguishes between the transactional waiting often discussed in the anthropological literature and the transitional waiting seen in the Gambia.