Fally Kebbeh and Mamadi Kumba: Emancipation and Slave Ancestry in the Twentieth-Century Urban Gambia

Fally Kebbeh and Mamadi Kumba were two slave descendants born in rural Gambia in the 1910s. By following their migration in the period before the outbreak of World War II to Bathurst, the capital of the Colony of the Gambia, this essay focuses on the opportunities and restraints that ambitious young men willing to shake off the social disability of their slave ancestry experienced both in their home contexts and in the urban setting. The cultural, economic, and social dynamism of colonial cities held the promise of anonymity. Yet a micro-historical focus on the trajectories of these two men shows that memories of a slave past could travel along the paths of rural-urban migration with different outcomes in the course of the individual life cycle. Indeed, as much as the village, the city could become a theater of post-slavery negotiations between former masters and former slaves.