Birth of The Confederation
In the short term, the Senegambia Confederation was a pragmatic union based on a mutual security interest. As previously mentioned, the Senegalese government had a fear of national instability caused by uprisings in either the Gambia or the Casamance region. This fear nearly became reality on 30 July 1981 when Gambian leftists attempted a coup d’état against President Sir Dawda Jawara. At the request of President Jawara, the Senegalese army entered The Gambia and successfully put down the insurrection. However, this new possibility of forced regime change, so close to home for both Banjul and Dakar, promoted the unification ideas which had been developing in the region. Léopold Sédar Senghor, first President of Senegal, was one of "les trois pères" ("the three fathers") of Negritude — a literary and ideologically socialist movement which encourages Africans throughout the Diaspora to embrace their shared culture. Senghor’s belief in Negritude not only informed a sense of the possibility of unification between Senegal and the Gambia, but it seems to have fostered the belief that unification would happen as an organic process. Senegal and the Gambia commissioned a United Nations report to study the possible plans and benefits of unification between the two countries in the 1960s. Despite the short-lived union, the Senegambia Confederation was one of the longest-lived African unions of the period.
Read more about this topic: Senegambia Confederation
Famous quotes containing the words birth of and/or birth:
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)
“Heaven does not permit the birth of useless people.”
—Chinese proverb.