Spiritual dragons, but very real. In 2010 the Village of Kubuneh got a proposition from a British resort owner, Lawrence Williams. He had an eco-resort adjacent to the mangroves on the Gambia river. He was also an artist. Williams, along with noted Gambian artist Njogou Touray proposed to village elders that they bring in famous graffiti and street artists from around the world to paint the village walls. It would gain publicity and promote The Gambia as a tourism destination. They would teach children art; the village would open a crafts store and a restaurant and have some extra income.

At the end of the tourist season Lawrence and Touray invited several noted graffiti and street artists including Remed (a Frenchman based in Spain); Xenz (from England); Tika (Swiss raised in Egypt); Know Hope (from Israel); Mysterious Al (Englishman residing in Australia); Freddy Sam (South Africa); Juse one (American living in Denmark) and probably the best known ROA from Belgium come and paint art on walls. Lawrence provided 1,000 gallons of paint.

It got a lot of publicity; the BBC ran at least one story on it. It also was featured in their program “From Our Own Correspondent.” It was written up in Lonely Planet. That’s what got me to want to visit Kubaneh when I was in The Gambia in 2018. But the tour company I hired did not take us there but to another village that was part of the Wide Open Walls project (read my post here about that here). But I still wanted to go to Kubuneh. I wanted to see if Wide Open Walls was still alive where it had started. The last post on the Wide Open Walls Facebook page was in 2017, the year before I first got there and the Wide Open Walls website went dark at about the same time.

This time when I booked our car in Gambia, I insisted I wanted to go to Kubuneh. More recent articles, including one in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) mentioned the Wide Open Walls Project in other villages but not Kubuneh, as did an article published by the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in China. The Gambia port lecturer, Professor Adama Bah, discouraged us from going there, telling me there were more interesting places. That made me more determined.

Alieu, our guide, and George, our driver, took us to the outskirts of Kubuneh where we picked up Modou Lamin Colley, as our local guide. The name Lamin is often given to the first-born son in a family. In West African culture it means “Leader” and according to Google’s AI summary it may be derived from Al-Amin, a title for given to the Prophet, meaning “Trustworthy.” Engaging Modou Lamin was the best move the tour company could make.

He got into the car and directed us into the woods. I questioned where we were going. The murals were on walls visible from the road, weren’t they?. Modou told me, “Be patient, we are going to the murals.” After a minute or so we got out of the car and started walking through the dry season forest. Emerging from the brush we saw faded paintings on crumbling buildings. It was not what I expected but the surprising is often better than expected. To paraphrase GK Chesterton if you are a traveler, you see what you see not what you have come to see.

Some of the buildings had begun to collapse. They were made of mud not protected by cement. A severe rainy season could cause them to “melt.” Some had wooden supports eaten away by termites. But the real problem came when the resort placed floating houses near the village and started building its own cement buildings. A dispute arose over a portion of the village called the Kolongding, the place from where the village derives its name. The Kolongding is where a dragon that protects the village lives and is sacred to the village. The elders did not want to disturb the site. According to Modou the dragon existed before the village was ever settled. It is a key ancestral place that plays an important role in preserving the traditions of the village. Modou says that in West Africa you do not see the dragon physically. It is more of a spiritual being. You know of its presence by signs, like the presence of fresh water in this case.
The village elders did not accept the resort’s proposal to use that land and withdrew their support from the project. The resort withdrew its resources and abandoned some of the buildings it constructed. So, this part of the Wide Open Walls Project is crumbling and fading back to nature.

But Wide Open Walls is still active in surrounding villages that have done a better job of preserving and refreshing the street art. They style themselves as The Gambia’s Art Villages. There is a blog post on that coming.

Kubuneh is still a lively village. I will also write more about that in a future post