A ticket to paradise comes very cheap in Gambia — as long as you’re headed in the right direction. Thomas Cook charges just £230 for the six-hour flight from Gatwick to West Africa, and in the cheaper hotels along the cream-white palm beaches, a week’s stay costs even less. For the 100,000 Europeans who flock here each year — half of them Brits — it’s a much loved, if slightly tatty, African Benidorm, where donkeys can be found not in the souvenir shops but grazing rubbish on the streets outside.
For the equally large numbers of Gambians seeking desperately to go the other way, however, the ticket is far pricier. A thousand euros will buy passage on the people–smugglers’ route to Europe, although here, the experience of sun, sand and sea is very different. If they don’t die of thirst crossing the baking sand dunes of the Sahara, they may well drown on the boat across the Med — a fate that has befallen both Fatim Jawara, a goalkeeper for the Gambian National Women’s football team, and Ali ‘Thousand Franc’ Mbengu, a champion Gambian wrestler, in the past six weeks.
Judging by the rate at which other Gambians are trying to make it across the Mediterranean, they may soon struggle to field any national sporting teams at all. Nearly 10,000 Gambians have crossed the Med so far this year, according to the UNHCR, making the tiny nation of 1.9 million one of Africa’s biggest per capita people-exporters.
So what has gone so wrong in Paradise? The answer stares down at you from billboards near the main tourist strip, where beaming away in paternal fashion is Gambia’s cane-swinging ruler, Yahya Jammeh, or, to give his full title, ‘His Excellency Sheikh Professor Doctor President’.
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