The motor bicycle that picked me at the SankulayKunda river side in order to travel to Fulabantang; if anything proved beyond any reasonable doubt how people and things have changed in my native village Fulabantang. 

I could remember years back while I was a student at Armitage, traveling to Fulabantang used to be a tedious undertaking for me. This is partly due to the fact that there were few vehicles running in the traffic and as a matter of fact nobody in the village thought of picking me.  But what more do I expect? After all, I do not expect things to remain as they were years back.

 While at the restaurant which is close to the ferry crossing point, I noticed the impressive rice fields that lay waiting to be harvested anytime soon. I could not help but marvel at the obliterated portrait of the Chinese man, Koba Lee, standing next to a dilapidated house bordering the rice fields. While I was still a small boy growing up in the village, my grandmothers had told about the man and how he died in The Gambia and was buried in Sankulaykunda.  The fact that he was buried near the rice fields indicated to me the influence the man wielded in that region and the unfinished business he left in terms of achieving food self-sufficiency.

Indeed rice cultivation has ever been a daunting challenge for farmers in that part of the country. The Jahally Patcharr project was meant to provide enough rice for the teeming mass of people, and by extension to the rest of the country.  With its fresh water and navigable river, the inhabitants of Central River South thought they should count themselves lucky when the Jahally Patcharr project was first initiated.  But like most projects in the developing countries, the dream of providing enough rice could not be sustained, endemic problems relating to logistics and human resource development affected the growth of Jahally Patcharr.

In those days, my grandmothers recounted what some people might tempted to call fairy tales of a  'ninki nanka' that sent a lot of Chinese agriculturists packing, thus retarding the intellectual growth and development of rice cultivation in the nascent Jahally Patcharr region. What was more amazing to me was the number of times I witnessed the tenacity of rice farmers mostly women who wake up early in the morning to remove weeds or plant rice seedlings in fanny fara, having prepard lunch before walking kilometers away.

In Fulabantang, I discovered that this once-popular settlement during the colonial days when the mission school was flooded with students from across the country in the 194os is now a shadow of itself.  Some of the village's influential elders had died and it seems a scepter is now haunting the traditional Fula settlement. New compounds have been erected everywhere, just as some old compounds have completely disappeared because those who once lived there had died or migrated to other places. 

Images and voices of people kept lurking in my mind as I went round on a self-embarked tour to witness the new or old Fulabantang, even though the compounds I had treaded on were empty because her people have gone to join their ancestors , I paused to remember  them in solitude.  There are certain things that never change anywhere no matter what happen, the location of the mission school was still there; only that the school now accommodates a middle school meaning students can now write their Grade 9 examination there.  Of course the church is still there and the pillars that support the 'father's house' begs for repairs but by looking at the building and the compound very well, the image it will tell you that this settlement had been around for close to a century. An era when the white colonialists went haywire desperately  looking for kids to teach at the mission school; and to succeed, they thought the best way was to go into compounds and fetch children they thought have some skills to learn.

It was a moment in those days, for a lot of Fula boys and girls nearly lost their original names when they began to answer to John, Peter, Christopher and Mary etc.  The relationship between the white masters was further enlivened when herd boys started receiving white men in their pen, despite the pungent smell of the cow dung and the fly that bugs you down whenever you come close to the pen. The white visitors knew what they wanted. And I suspect, if anything the white colonists who took the kids to school had other reasons; that's why today, more than ever before, Fulabantang is reeling from this acute shortage of brains to take the village to another level.

The youths who should be at the fore front of development are nowhere to be seen; they are either in the city performing white-collar jobs or in Europe looking for money.  Of course, dissident parents who manifested their opposition to having their children go to school would have said had they been around, they had been totally vindicated, because their kids have been kidnapped by education and taken far away to develop someone else's land.  And fear of returning home to join the family keeps haunting others thereby make them resigned to their own fate; as if anything from the village was considered evil and that it was better to stay wherever you are than in the village.

Never has there been any point in time like this: I was told the Fulabantang football team put up a spirited fight against a town like Jangjang Bureh during one of its last matches held at the field close to the Sankulaykunda road. I watched briefly with keen interest how certain things within a relatively short period of time have dramatically changed. It was all written on their faces as the budding footballers struggled to take the required possession to win the game and restore some hope and pride in their camps. The wind of change has virtually swept across all spheres of life in Fulabantang. Some Islamic scholars have emerged in the area and as a matter of fact old ideas have started to fade away to give room for new ones which means that the Islamic religion is being firmly embraced in most homes.

The untold story of an old man who travels from village to village by foot took many by surprise when at the Islamic gathering I attended, his name was mentioned. He does not ask for money from those he teaches.  And all that he enjoys is the satisfaction he derives from teaching God's messages. The narrator, Alh. Ifra, who has carved a niche for himself for being instrumental in the area of moral preaching, confessed that not many people in that region can sacrifice like Alh. Abdoulie Jallow.

Years back, the community was not like that: a man who would entice his people with religious talk, tell them to do well and pray for the peace and success of the government and its leader.

He vehemently told them not to try to plant evil machinations against the leadership as it would back fire on them, arguing that the holy scriptures place a lot of respect for leaders, and the best thing to do was to have good intentions for one's country. The future looks brighter for poultry farmers; that is if they continue to nurture the lofty dreams they have manifested by embarking on the business of rearing and selling chicken eggs they hope to reduce the effects of poverty. The Governor of the Central River Region, Alh. Ganye Touray believes like most Gambians that the president, His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alh.

Dr Yahya AJJ Jammeh will surely develop the region. The construction of the Sankulay Kunda bridge is perhaps one major factor why the people have every reason to believe that Fulladou shall rise again like the good old days when no one ever thought of buying a bag of rice. Fulabantang is the ancestral home of the author, Ebrima Baldeh. This article was written after his recent visit there.