By Dr Ebrima Ceesay
When a fence crosses a border, what does sovereignty really mean?
The recent controversy surrounding the military fence at Bulock has already generated strong emotions and competing narratives about sovereignty, territorial integrity and the relationship between The Gambia and Senegal.
But perhaps the most important lesson from Bulock lies beyond the fence itself. It lies in a much more fundamental question: How does a modern state actually know where its territory begins and ends?
That may sound like a technical question. In reality, it is one of the foundations of sovereignty. A state can have a flag, an army, a constitution and internationally recognised borders. But sovereignty also requires something less visible and considerably less dramatic: the institutional ability to identify, document, survey, map and administer those borders with precision.
The Bulock episode has therefore presented The Gambia with an opportunity to think beyond the immediate controversy and examine something deeper – the relationship between territorial sovereignty and technical state capacity.
A fence is not a border. The recent admission by Lands Minister Hamat Bah has introduced an important distinction into the public discussion. According to reports from the National Assembly, the Minister said that the location where the Bulock military fence was constructed had been confirmed to be on Senegalese territory.
Minister Hamat Bah emphasised that this did not mean that The Gambia was surrendering territory, but rather that the location of the structure had been established in relation to the existing boundary. This distinction matters enormously.
A fence is a physical structure. A military installation is a physical structure. A road is a physical structure. A farm is a physical activity. None of these, by themselves, determines where an international boundary legally lies. That boundary derives from the historical, legal and technical instruments through which the two states recognise their respective territories.
This is why the language of “taking land” can sometimes obscure the real issue. If a structure has been constructed on the wrong side of an established boundary, correcting the location of that structure does not necessarily mean that one country has lost territory to another.
It may simply mean that the physical reality has been brought back into conformity with the recognised boundary. That appears to be the logic behind the Lands Minister’s statement. And this is precisely why the Bulock episode should lead us toward a more sophisticated conversation about borders.
The border is not simply a line on a map. Most citizens encounter an international border as an abstract line. On a map, it may appear as a thin stroke separating two countries. On the ground, however, a border is something much more complicated.
It has coordinates. It has historical agreements. It has maps. It has boundary descriptions. It has survey records. It has monuments and pillars. It has geographical reference points. It has administrative consequences. And, perhaps most importantly, it requires institutions capable of maintaining and interpreting all of these things.
Historical records held in British archives demonstrate the extent to which technical work was involved in establishing the Gambia-Senegal frontier more than a century ago. The British Library, for example, holds 1904 and 1905 maps relating to the Anglo-French boundary, including a 1904 tracing explicitly described as showing the frontier line being re-cut and new pillars erected by the Anglo-French Commission.
Another 1904-1905 map identifies the boundary between the British and French possessions and records the work of the commissioners involved. In other words, the border was never simply a matter of somebody drawing a line and walking away. It required technical work. It required joint work. It required documentation. And it required physical markers on the ground.
But not every pillar in the bush is a boundary pillar. This is an important point that deserves much greater public attention. When people see concrete pillars in border areas, there can be a tendency to assume that every one of them represents an international boundary. That is not necessarily the case.
Border areas can contain different types of monuments and survey markers, including historical boundary pillars, geodetic pillars and district boundary pillars established for different administrative or surveying purposes. The distinction is critical.
According to archival material concerning the original boundary work, the colonial boundary monuments were part of a specific Anglo-French boundary exercise. This means that identifying an original boundary pillar is itself a technical and historical exercise.
It is not enough to find a concrete structure in the bush and declare: “This is the border”. One must establish what the monument is, when it was erected, under what authority it was established, where it was recorded, how it relates to the boundary documentation, and whether its present position corresponds with the recognised boundary. That is the work of a state that takes territorial administration seriously.
The forgotten work of the Anglo-French Boundary Commission
There is another lesson here. The original demarcation of the Gambia-Senegal boundary was not simply a unilateral British exercise or a unilateral French exercise. It involved cooperation between the two colonial powers.
The surviving archival record illustrates this technical character of the process. Maps from 1904-1905 identify the work of the Anglo-French Boundary Commission, while archival descriptions refer specifically to the frontier being re-cut and new pillars being erected by the joint commission.
A historical annual report for the Gambia also records the replacement of earlier boundary marks with masonry pillars during this period, illustrating the scale of the physical marking exercise. This historical fact has a contemporary lesson.
Boundary demarcation is fundamentally a collective exercise. Two states sharing a border cannot permanently manage that border through unilateral assumptions. They need joint technical mechanisms. They need common records. They need agreed coordinates. They need procedures for resolving discrepancies.
And they need the political maturity to recognise that technical cooperation on a boundary is not a surrender of sovereignty. Quite the opposite. It is an expression of sovereignty.
Demarcation and densification are not the same thing
This distinction is particularly important in understanding the current work along the Gambia-Senegal boundary. Demarcation establishes and identifies the boundary on the ground. Densification is a subsequent process of making that boundary easier to identify by adding additional markers between existing reference points.
The purpose is not necessarily to redraw the international boundary. It is to make the boundary more visible and more practical. Imagine a long road with only a handful of signs. The absence of signs between those points does not mean that the road disappears. But it makes navigation more difficult.
The same principle can apply to an international boundary. If historical boundary pillars are widely spaced, damaged, missing or difficult to locate, communities, farmers, security personnel, surveyors and administrators may encounter uncertainty about the precise location of the line.
Additional markers can reduce that uncertainty. This is why the present process of boundary densification should not automatically be interpreted through the political language of territorial concession. It is better understood as an effort to improve the physical identification of an already recognised boundary.
The tragedy of imprecision
For people living far from the border, a disagreement over a few metres of land can seem insignificant. For communities living along the frontier, it can be anything but insignificant. A few metres can determine whether a farm lies in one jurisdiction or another.
It can affect where a road can be built. It can determine which authority has responsibility for a particular location. It can affect security installations. It can create disputes between farmers. And when the issue involves military facilities, a relatively small geographical uncertainty can acquire an entirely different strategic significance. That is why precision matters.
A border that is legally established but poorly marked on the ground creates opportunities for misunderstanding. A border that is well documented, accurately surveyed and clearly marked reduces those opportunities.
The objective, therefore, should not simply be to have a border. The objective should be to have a knowable border. This is where sovereignty becomes technical.
There is a tendency to understand sovereignty primarily in political and military terms. A sovereign state must defend its territory. It must protect its citizens. It must resist external interference. All of that is true.
But sovereignty also has a technical dimension. Can the state produce the map? Can it identify the coordinates? Can it locate the boundary monuments? Can it retrieve the historical documentation? Can its surveyors reproduce the boundary on the ground? Can its land administration system distinguish an international boundary pillar from a geodetic or district monument? Can its military planners establish whether a proposed installation sits inside or outside national territory? Can its institutions communicate the same geographical information consistently to the army, the Lands Ministry, local authorities and communities?
These are not secondary questions. They are part of sovereignty itself. This brings us back to an idea I have previously described as the Cartographer’s State.
The strongest state is not necessarily the state with the loudest rhetoric about sovereignty. It is the state that possesses the knowledge and institutional capacity to make sovereignty operational.
That requires maps. It requires archives. It requires land registries. It requires surveyors. It requires geospatial technology. It requires reliable coordinates. It requires historical documentation. It requires trained personnel. And it requires institutions that can work across ministries and across borders.
A modern state cannot afford to discover the precise location of its international boundary only after a dispute has emerged. It should know before the dispute. It should know where every important boundary monument is. It should know which monuments are original, which are later survey markers and which have disappeared.
It should maintain the historical documentation. It should digitise the information. And it should ensure that new infrastructure and security installations are checked against authoritative boundary data before construction begins. That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is territorial security.
Bulock should therefore become a lesson, not a wound The Gambian Government initially described the demolition of part of the Bulock military installation’s perimeter fence by Senegalese forces as profoundly provocative and unacceptable, while simultaneously reaffirming its commitment to resolving the issue through dialogue and established bilateral mechanisms.
Senegal, for its part, said it had previously raised concerns about what it described as encroachments affecting its territorial integrity and called for a durable solution. These competing political narratives are important. But they should not be the end of the conversation.
The more useful question is: What can The Gambia learn from the fact that a military fence could be constructed in a location subsequently acknowledged by its own government to be on the Senegalese side of the boundary?
The answer should not simply be embarrassment. It should be institutional reform. Before major military, administrative or infrastructural projects are undertaken near an international boundary, there should be an authoritative process for confirming the exact location of that boundary.
There should be no ambiguity between what the map says, what the survey says, what the land records say and what the engineer builds. That is how a state learns. That is how institutions mature.
From colonial pillars to modern coordinates
There is also an interesting historical irony here. The border that we are now trying to understand with modern surveying and geospatial technology was physically marked more than a century ago through painstaking joint work by British and French officials. Those colonial boundary pillars were built in an era before satellites, GPS and modern digital mapping.
Yet the principle remains remarkably relevant. The technology has changed. The requirement for precision has not. The old boundary pillar and the modern GPS coordinate are different instruments serving essentially the same strategic purpose: to translate an abstract legal boundary into a physical reality that people can identify.
That is the deeper meaning of densification. It is not simply about pouring concrete. It is about converting legal geography into operational geography.
The border is a national asset. Perhaps we should therefore change the way we think about our borders. A border should not be viewed only as a line that separates The Gambia from Senegal. It should be treated as national infrastructure.
Just as we maintain roads, bridges, ports, power networks and communications systems, we need to maintain the institutional infrastructure of territorial sovereignty. That means maintaining boundary records.
It means preserving archives. It means surveying. It means replacing damaged monuments. It means installing additional markers where necessary. It means maintaining accurate digital maps. It means training a new generation of Gambian surveyors, cartographers, geographers, historians and border-management specialists. And it means ensuring that political leaders understand the technical information upon which territorial decisions depend.
The future of Gambian sovereignty
The lesson of Bulock should therefore be bigger than Bulock. The question is not simply whether one fence was constructed on the wrong side of a boundary. The larger question is whether The Gambia possesses the permanent institutional capacity to know, manage and defend every metre of its territory.
That is a much more important question. Because sovereignty is not merely the ability to say: “This is our land”.
Sovereignty is the ability to demonstrate precisely where that land begins and ends, why the boundary is there, how it is documented, and how the state ensures that its own actions remain consistent with that knowledge.
That is where diplomacy, history, geography, law and technology converge. And perhaps this is the opportunity hidden inside the controversy. Instead of allowing Bulock to become another chapter in a cycle of outrage, accusation and counter-accusation, The Gambia can use it as a catalyst for building a stronger architecture of territorial knowledge.
A country approaching its second century of independence should not merely inherit its maps. It should understand them. It should preserve them. It should continuously verify them. And, above all, it should build the institutional capacity to turn the lines on those maps into a secure, peaceful and well-governed territorial reality. The ultimate lesson of Bulock may therefore be surprisingly simple: A sovereign state must not only defend its borders. It must know them.
Dr Ebrima Ceesay, is a Gambian academic and former editor of the Daily Observer newspaper based in the UK.