Perfect, David: "Historical Dictionary of the Gambia, 5th ed."(Book review)

• Author: Ceesay, Hassoum

Perfect, David. Historical Dictionary of The Gambia (fifth edition). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016.

Once touted as an oasis of democracy and good governance during its first 30 years of independence from the United Kingdom on 18 February 1965, The Gambia has experienced authoritarian rule and human rights violations since Yahya Jammeh came to power in 1994. David Perfect, a researcher at the University of Chester in the United Kingdom, contends that Jammeh has crushed all "challenges posed by the opposition political parties and has managed to avoid being overthrown by force," which has allowed him to remain the undisputed ruler of The Gambia (p. 21). This antipodal experience of Gambian history is well-captured in this edition of the Historical Dictionary of The Gambia. The book provides the most up-to-date reference material on people, places, and events in this small West African country, from antiquity to the present. Its goal is to provide a dependable source of facts and figures about Gambian history. Unfortunately, even before the book rolled off the press certain entries already need to be updated. Entries such as Momodou Sabally (p. 326), Aboubacarr Senghor (p. 392), and Political Parties (pp. 343-344) already require an update. This is a common hazard when writing an historical dictionary.

Perfect, who co-authored the fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of The Gambia (2008) with Arnold Hughes, a long-time scholar at the University of Birmingham who served as the director of Perfect's Ph.D. dissertation, has been researching The Gambia since the 1980s. An intrepid and enterprising scholar, Perfect is able to make sense of the characters who color the country's history. His intrepidness is revealed when he attempts to list all of government ministers who have occupied important positions since 1994. In the Justice Ministry, there have been "no fewer than" seventeen ministers in the past twenty years (p. 253).

The Historical Dictionary of The Gambia fills a yawning gap in Gambian studies. Ordinarily, The Gambia, the nation with the smallest territorial footprint in Africa, is the least studied and written about of the four former British colonies in West Africa. Until 1975, the only comprehensive scholarly study of The Gambia was J. M. Gray's History of The Gambia, which had been published in 1940. Fortunately, for students of Gambian history, the first Historical Dictionary of The Gambia was unveiled in...