Be Careful What You Wish For: The Gambia’s Crossroads Between Progress and Identity
By Baba Colley
By all accounts, it appears the people of The Gambia harbor ambitious dreams for our nation’s future. We envision a vibrant democracy paired with a robust capitalist economy—a country transformed by four-lane highways cutting through the landscape, airports and seaports buzzing with international commerce, and construction cranes dotting city skylines as symbols of perpetual growth. Our markets and streets would hum with the electric energy of economic activity. We imagine gleaming skyscrapers rising from our towns in Kiang and Foni, a world-class healthcare system accessible to even people from Badibou, and yes, a state-of-the-art football stadium in Kiang Jali magnificent enough to host FIFA-sanctioned matches and put Gambian football back on the map. The vision is undeniably seductive.
Beyond physical infrastructure, our aspirations extend to the very fabric of governance and society. We dream of a democratic government that genuinely embodies the principle of being of the people, for the people, and by the people—not merely as rhetoric but as lived reality. We long for a nation where every citizen can freely express their thoughts and opinions without fear of reprisal, where people can worship whatever god they choose or choose no god at all, and where individuals have the freedom to marry whomever they love, regardless of traditional expectations.
We envision a society characterized by health, freedom, and universal education—where knowledge is not a privilege of the few but a right of the many. In this imagined future, our people would move seamlessly across borders to conduct business with our brothers and sisters throughout Africa, with reciprocal freedom for them to do the same here. Economic integration would strengthen pan-African solidarity while enriching our own prosperity.
It’s a beautiful vision, isn’t it? Who could argue against progress, prosperity, and freedom? Well there will be some trade offs
The Hidden Price of Progress
Yet the answer to whether this vision is truly desirable depends entirely on what we are willing to surrender to achieve it. This is where the dream becomes complicated, where we must confront uncomfortable truths. One of life’s cruelest realities is that everything worth fighting for carries an opportunity cost—there is always something we must sacrifice, something we must leave behind on the altar of progress.
Our people have spent not decades or centuries, but thousands of years cultivating the social fabric we possess today. They have built a society with values and systems that have weathered colonialism, economic hardship, and political upheaval. These are not accidental features of Gambian life but carefully maintained traditions passed down through generations, refined by the wisdom of our great grandparents, grandparents and parents.
Consider what makes Gambian society distinct. We live in communities where helping one another is not viewed as a weakness or naive sentimentality, but celebrated as one of our greatest collective strengths. When a neighbor’s roof collapses, the community gathers to rebuild it. When a family faces hardship, extended relatives and even distant acquaintances contribute what they can. This mutual support system has been our insurance policy, our social safety net, our way of ensuring that no one is left behind.
But in a hyper-capitalist society—the very system we claim to want—these values are systematically eroded. The ethos shifts from “we are in this together” to “what’s in it for me?” Individual accumulation becomes the highest virtue, and community obligation becomes an inconvenience, even a hindrance to personal success. The person who stops to help others is seen as foolish for not maximizing their own advantage. Efficiency and profit margins trump human connection. The question becomes not “How can we all prosper?” but “How can I get ahead?”
Take another cherished aspect of our culture: the Friday tradition of giving to beggars lined up outside the mosque. In our current society, this act is seen as a great virtue, a religious duty, and an expression of compassion for those less fortunate. It reinforces our connection to one another and our responsibility to share what we have with those who have less. But in the fully realized capitalist democracy we say we want, this same act would be viewed very differently. We would have to become comfortable with asking those same beggars why they aren’t getting jobs like everyone else. The narrative would shift from compassion to judgment, from collective responsibility to individual accountability. “They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” we would say, borrowing the language of societies that have already traveled this path.
The Transformation We Don’t Talk About
The modernization we dream about doesn’t just change our infrastructure and economy—it fundamentally reshapes our values, our relationships, and our sense of who we are. The shiny buildings and busy airports come packaged with a complete worldview, a way of seeing ourselves and each other that may be incompatible with the social systems that have sustained us.
In fully developed capitalist democracies, success is increasingly measured in purely material terms. Your worth as a person becomes tied to your economic productivity, your net worth, your job title, your possessions. The person who chooses to care for elderly parents instead of pursuing career advancement is seen as making a poor life choice. The extended family system—which has been our social security, our childcare system, our elder care, and our unemployment insurance—becomes viewed as a burden that prevents individual mobility and economic efficiency.
Moreover, the rapid urbanization that accompanies modernization fractures the tight-knit communities that have defined Gambian life. People move to cities for opportunities, leaving behind the villages where everyone knows your name and your family’s history going back generations. In the cities, you become anonymous, disconnected, self-reliant by necessity rather than by choice. The accountability that comes from living among people who have known you your entire life disappears, and with it, one of the strongest checks on antisocial behavior.
The question of freedom, too, is more complex than it first appears. Yes, we want freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom to marry whom we choose. These are legitimate aspirations. But freedom in the Western liberal tradition often means freedom from obligation, freedom from community expectations, freedom from anything that constrains individual choice. It can become a lonely freedom, where each person is sovereign over their own life but disconnected from the web of relationships and responsibilities that give life meaning and purpose.
A Conversation We Must Have
This is not an argument against progress or an endorsement of keeping The Gambia frozen in time. Our current systems have their own problems—corruption, inefficiency, limited opportunities, especially for our youth. People are taking the “back way” because they see no future here, and that should concern us all. We need economic development, better infrastructure, improved healthcare and education, and yes, more accountable governance.
But I think the Gambian people need to have an honest, searching conversation about what we truly want and what we’re willing to give up to get it. We need to ask ourselves difficult questions: Do we really want everything that comes with the Western model of democratic capitalism, or have we been seduced by its most attractive features while ignoring its significant downsides? Are we prepared for the social fragmentation, the loss of community cohesion, the replacement of collective values with individualism? Can we live with the inequality that capitalism inevitably produces, where some people accumulate vast wealth while others struggle to survive?
If the answer is that we don’t want all the vices that accompany democratic capitalism—the atomization, the materialism, the erosion of community bonds, the winner-take-all mentality—then we need to have a serious conversation about building something different. Perhaps what we need is not to import a system wholesale, but to create a hybrid model uniquely suited to Gambian values and realities.
Such a system would seek to increase our economic productivity and create more opportunities without sacrificing the social systems that have sustained us for generations. It would embrace certain aspects of capitalism—entrepreneurship, innovation, competition, efficiency—while maintaining strong community support structures and collective responsibility for the vulnerable. It would protect individual freedoms while preserving the bonds of obligation that tie us to our families and communities. It would modernize our economy without requiring us to abandon our values.
Other societies have attempted similar balancing acts with varying degrees of success. The Nordic countries have tried to pair robust capitalism with strong social safety nets and communitarian values. Several Asian societies have pursued rapid economic development while maintaining greater emphasis on family and social harmony than Western individualism permits. Various African nations are experimenting with governance and economic models that try to honor both traditional values and modern aspirations. We can learn from all of these examples while crafting something distinctly Gambian.
The Path Forward
The future of The Gambia should not be a simple choice between remaining as we are or becoming a copy of London, New York, or Singapore. We deserve better than that false binary. We have the opportunity—and indeed the responsibility—to thoughtfully design a future that honors our past while embracing necessary change, that creates prosperity while maintaining the social bonds that make prosperity meaningful, that expands freedom while preserving the sense of mutual obligation that makes freedom sustainable.
But this will require wisdom, patience, and most importantly, honest dialogue about what we truly value and what we’re willing to sacrifice. It will require resisting the temptation to simply import solutions from elsewhere and instead doing the hard work of building something that reflects our own character and aspirations. It will require acknowledging that progress always involves tradeoffs and being intentional about which tradeoffs we’re willing to make.
The Gambia stands at a crossroads. The path we choose will determine not just our material prosperity but the very soul of our nation. We must choose wisely, with eyes wide open to both the promises and the perils that lie ahead. Because once we start down certain paths, it becomes very difficult to turn back. And we may find that in gaining the world we dreamed of, we lost something of ourselves that can never be recovered.
So yes, be careful what you wish for. But also be bold enough to imagine something better than the limited options the world presents to us. The future of The Gambia doesn’t have to be written by someone else.