By Dr Cherno Omar Barry
In June 1975, at a Middle Temple weekend at Cumberland Lodge, a young Gambian barrister rose to speak for a motion of deceptive simplicity: that there are three things — the law, the facts, and the presentation of the case — and that the greatest of these is the presentation. He confessed, disarmingly, that had the debate been held two days earlier he would have argued the other side. Fifty years later, that speech opens In My Opinion, the selected speeches and writings of Fafa Edrissa M’Bai, and it still reads as the truest thing in the collection.
I have returned to that volume slowly, in the way such a book asks to be read. It confirms what those who have heard him already know: that M’Bai remains one of The Gambia’s finest public speakers, and that his distinction lies not in eloquence alone but in intellectual discipline, moral conviction, historical perspective and literary range — an ability to move without strain between scholarship and inspiration.
But the more I read, the more I found myself pursuing a different question than the one I began with. Not how does this man speak? but why is the ability to speak so unevenly distributed among us, and what does that cost a continent?
The architecture of a Gambian eloquence
Read enough of these speeches and a method emerges. M’Bai opens with a dignified acknowledgement that establishes immediate respect for the audience. He frames historically or philosophically before he approaches his subject. He proceeds from the broad principle to the particular occasion, never the reverse. His vocabulary is rich but controlled, never ornamental for its own sake. He quotes — from literature, philosophy, scripture, history, statesmen — but always in service of an argument, never as decoration. His moral undertones are steady: duty, service, integrity, scholarship, nation-building. His transitions are elegant. And his conclusions challenge the audience while leaving it lifted.
That is a craft, and it can be taught. What cannot be taught so easily is the disposition beneath it. In his foreword to the collection, the late N. S. Z. Njie makes a claim that has stayed with me: that for understanding a personality, speeches are often more revealing than deeds, because no action, however noble, can give voice to the whole interior life of a person — while speech can. He measures M’Bai against Cicero’s standard, that the true orator handles small matters lightly, moderate matters moderately and great matters with weight, keeping the style always equal to the subject. And he identifies the source: a speaker so directed cannot simply mirror the crowd. He consults his conscience, determines his position in the light of his convictions, and is therefore unafraid to be found in the minority.
That is the part we tend to overlook when we praise oratory. We admire the surface and ignore the foundation. The foundation is formation — reading, argument, moral seriousness, the long apprenticeship of the mind.
Speech is not ornament; it is infrastructure
Here is where the collection stops being a literary pleasure and becomes, for me, a development document.
We speak of participation as though it were a matter of counting heads. It is not. Participation is the capacity to state your case in a room where decisions are made, and to state it well enough that it changes the decision. A person who cannot marshal facts, order an argument, anticipate objection and speak with confidence is present at the meeting but absent from the outcome. The presentation of the case is very often the case.
This is why I have come to regard articulacy not as a refinement but as infrastructure — as basic to development as a road or a clinic. And like our roads and our clinics, it is unevenly built.
Consider what we know. Across sub-Saharan Africa, roughly nine in ten ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple passage of text — the finding of the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF in 2022. Closer to home, only about thirteen per cent of Gambian children have foundational reading skills, and in rural areas the figure falls to around seven. These are not statistics about examinations. They are statistics about voice. A child who cannot read a text cannot interrogate a budget, contest a contract, write to a newspaper, or stand at a podium and be listened to. We are producing, at scale, citizens with a vote but without a say.
Accessible, affordable, relevant — and in whose language?
My own work has therefore concentrated on a narrow and stubborn proposition: that literacy, skills and education of every kind must be made accessible, affordable and relevant to as many African communities as need them. The three adjectives are not interchangeable, and the third is the one we forget. Education can be available and cheap and still be irrelevant — still address a life the learner does not live, in an idiom the learner does not think in.
Which brings me to language, and to a coincidence in M’Bai’s own volume that I did not expect.
Among the addresses is one delivered at the launching of the Professor Lamin Sanneh Foundation. Sanneh’s great scholarly contribution — Translating the Message — argued that the rendering of sacred and intellectual texts into vernacular languages did not dilute cultures but revitalised them; that the mother tongue, far from being a limitation, was the instrument through which peoples recovered and asserted themselves. A Gambian scholar made that argument to the world. We have been slow to apply it at home.
The urgency is now technological as well as pedagogical. As mainstream artificial intelligence becomes a gateway to knowledge, our languages are being sorted into the seen and the unseen. Wolof and Pulaar were added to Google Translate in 2024. Mandinka — a major Gambian language — appears in neither Google Translate nor Meta’s principal open translation model. Flagship “African” language models built on the continent cover Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, isiZulu and isiXhosa, and no Gambian language at all. A child may soon sit before a machine that can answer any question in the world, in every language but her own.
I explore technology as a means. I do not accept it as the only one, and I do not accept it uncritically. A tool trained on someone else’s corpus will reproduce someone else’s assumptions, fluently and at speed. That is not neutrality; it is narration by default. The remedy is not to refuse the tool but to insist on the conditions: that our languages are recorded and represented, that our indigenous knowledge is treated as knowledge rather than folklore, that the teacher — not the machine — retains judgement in the classroom, and that policy is written by people who know what a Gambian classroom actually contains.
The tempo and the narrative
My lifelong vision is that every African should have a voice and a say in the development of their community, their country and their continent. I hold this not as sentiment but as a condition of independence. A continent whose people cannot articulate their own priorities will always have those priorities articulated for it — by lenders, by partners, by consultants, by algorithms. Someone will always be willing to speak on our behalf, and to be paid for it.
Only when we can present our own case, in our own languages, from our own evidence, will we be free to pursue our development goals without another party setting the tempo or controlling the narrative. Independence is not the absence of a colonial flag. It is the presence of an articulate public.
Not too philosophical
I am sometimes asked whether this is too philosophical a way to think about schools and books and reading programmes. I have decided that it is not. Philosophy, stripped of its intimidations, is simply the discipline of asking who decides, on what grounds, and in whose interest. That is not an abstraction. It is the most practical question in African development, and we ask it too rarely.
So I return to the motion of 1975, and I widen it beyond the courtroom where it was argued. We have the facts: the enrolment figures, the learning assessments, the language data, the honest record of what has worked and what has not. We have the law: constitutions, education acts, continental frameworks, a mother-tongue policy waiting to be resourced. What we have not yet built, at the scale required, is the presentation — the formed, confident, literate African voice that can take the facts and the law and make them move.
That voice is not a gift bestowed on a rare few, as we sometimes imply when we praise our great orators. It is a capacity, and capacities are built. Fafa Edrissa M’Bai’s speeches are worth preserving for their beauty. They are worth studying for their method. But they are worth teaching for a larger reason: to demonstrate to a Gambian child, in a Gambian classroom, that this too is available to her — and then to make sure it actually is.
Cherno Omar Barry is President of the Writers’ Association of The Gambia. In My Opinion: Selected Speeches and Writings by Fafa Edrissa M’Bai (second edition, XamXam Books, 2024) is available in Fajara.