The powerful new cruise through a region of West Africa with a painful past

For decades, West Africa’s most navigable waterway has been all but abandoned – but a new era of river travel might be emerging - MARK STRATTON
For decades, West Africa’s most navigable waterway has been all but abandoned – but a new era of river travel might be emerging - MARK STRATTON

When the Lady Chilel listed to port in 1984, her Glaswegian hull groaning with the realisation she faced a tropical watery grave, West Africa’s most navigable waterway became a backwater, the sole preserve of fishermen in wooden pirogues hewn from kapok trees.

She was the Gambia River’s last passenger vessel and was never replaced. A subsequent new road into the interior from The Gambia’s breezy coastal capital, Banjul, ensured centuries of river travel withered away. And even the toubabs, as we Caucasians are known, who for 500 years furthered colonial ambitions upriver and plundered African slaves, turned their backs on her, facing outwards to the ocean, preferring winter sun resorts on creamy Atlantic beaches.

Yet might a new era of river travel be emerging? Because when I sail past the sunken Lady Chilel two days upriver from Banjul, I’m on a seven-day cruise called Rivers of West Africa, offered by a leading UK tour-operator (the cruise was launched pre-coronavirus – and is scheduled to resume for the 2021-22 season).

As we pass the wreck, looking on with rheumy eyes is 75-year-old Momodou Mboob, the oldest pilot on the Gambia River. He’s worked the river since 1968 and is piloting the Greek crew of Harmony V: our sleek 183ft-long yacht, whitewashed like the villas of Santorini and with a pointed bow like a Spartan’s javelin. She wouldn’t look out of place in the Aegean.

“Lady Chilel just lay down,” Momodou recalls. “She didn’t hit anything but turned and capsized against the flow”. He sailed upon her, but not on 1984’s fateful voyage that claimed four lives. “They say the captain got her balance wrong. He emptied a fuel tank on one side, leaving her too heavy on the other, so she tipped.”

The sunken wreck of Lady Chilel, The Gambia's last passenger vessel - MARK STRATTON
The sunken wreck of Lady Chilel, The Gambia's last passenger vessel - MARK STRATTON

The weekly service was popular with locals and tourists alike and took three days upriver from Banjul to Basse, stopping frequently to offload cargo during a 138-nautical-mile voyage. “Her sinking was a disaster for the river. There’s been no passenger vessels since,” he sighs. “It was an interesting journey. You saw real African life.”

Real life. Exactly what I hoped for of a river bursting with exotic geographical promise: its source in the mysterious Guinean Highlands, then a languorous 700-mile journey to ocean through The Gambia’s skinny, snaking land mass, entirely surrounded by Senegal. It’s in Senegal where our cruise begins, from the dystopian Port of Dakar, where canary-yellow mounds of uncovered sulphur offer rare colour to a monochrome ugliness of acrid lorry-pollution and oil-stained roads.

My fellow passengers are a far more cosmopolitan bunch than is typical of the stereotyped image of sunbathing tourists on the beach: a group of Russian birdwatchers have their expensive Swarovski optics poised for action, while diehard cruisers are beguiled by the promise of a small boat and the Gambia upriver.

It’s a 12-hour voyage from Dakar thereafter, south down Senegal’s Atlantic coast to the Gambia River’s mouth. I spend time on Harmony V’s upper-deck with the Russians watching Caspian terns fish, straight-diving like plumb-lines, and disembark briefly in the Siné-Saloum Delta, at Fadiouth Island, where seashell lanes crunch under the weight of donkey carts, and the spices and calls-to-prayer lend an air of a petit Zanzibar.

“That’s Lady Wright,” says Momodou, four hours later, as we dock in Banjul to complete our upriver complement of 34 passengers. He gestures towards a half-sunken wreck providing a perch for jowly pelicans. Scuttled here in 1979 after a fire, she preceded Lady Chilel, coming into service around 1949 and named after the governor’s wife during British administration. She was the Gambia River’s floating post-office and ferried colonials upriver in first-class cabins to backwater towns where the exportation of groundnuts had superseded slaves.

New roads into the interior from The Gambia’s breezy coastal capital, Banjul, led to centuries of river travel withering away - GETTY
New roads into the interior from The Gambia’s breezy coastal capital, Banjul, led to centuries of river travel withering away - GETTY

We leave Banjul at dusk, trailed by bottlenose dolphins, hurrying like mythological Nereids who’ve missed the boat. It’s an overnight voyage to Tendaba, a riverside village with a little clay-coloured mosque with square minarets. By now the river has narrowed and is no longer several miles wide. Mangroves exude flakes of salty crystals through their pores, sucking tidal creeks expose mudflats yielding cold-eyed crocodiles.

Among Tendaba’s mangroves are Hitchcockian densities of birds. The Gambia boasts 560 avian species, both resident and migratory, says Assan Saine, our on-board naturalist, leading us on daily excursions with an endearingly enthusiastic approach of anthropomorphising our dear feathered friends. Gambian birds are dazzling. Long-tailed glossy starlings, plumage skipping the light fantastic between indigo and Tyrian-purple; lilac Abyssinian rollers, so beautiful, Assan claims he wants to marry them. And flexitarian palm-nut vultures eschewing a species stereotype for rotting flesh with a supplementary diet of fish and nuts.

“These birds are cheaters,” he exclaims loudly one day, spotting the crooked conks of two hornbills. “They have partners but do not need to book a hotel with another bird to do dirty deeds because in five seconds it’s done before their loved ones notice.”

In the evening there’s a barbecue on the aft-deck, chargrilled monkfish and molten aubergine slices filling the cooling night air with deliciously smoky aromas. Further upriver, our voyage becomes a window into traditional Africa’s soul. Far removed from the coastal resorts. Dark skies and no discos. Silent arcadian waters as the mangroves yield to drier savannah. Leathery baobabs with Apollo 11 girths, riverbank villages, little more than extended-family compounds, inside which a man must build each of his four permissible wives their own elephant-grass thatched hut.

After 100 miles, we moor at Kuntaur’s wharf, piled high with groundnuts, Upper Gambia’s only real cash-crop. Harmony V cannot proceed any further, she lacks the draught. “At one point yesterday, we had only eight inches’ clearance,” says Captain Gerasimos, which is exactly why old Momodou is aboard: to ensure Lady Chilel’s fate doesn’t befall us.

Bottlenose dolphins trail the boat at sunset - MARK STRATTON
Bottlenose dolphins trail the boat at sunset - MARK STRATTON

Further forays upriver are by flat-bottomed pirogues, one afternoon passing grunting hippos in the River Gambia National Park and chimpanzees aping around a mid-river island jungle, whooping like asthmatic steam engines – except one unflappable alpha-male, playing it cool, sitting riverside, chin resting on his knuckles like Rodin’s The Thinker.

“Twenty-four chimpanzees were brought here from zoos or confiscated from pet owners back in 1979 and have bred. We now have 132,” says a local park ranger. “They can’t swim, so cannot leave the islands,” he adds, leaving me wondering why, if they share 98.8 per cent of human DNA, they haven’t mastered the doggy paddle.

Our final two days unmask the Gambia River’s darkest secrets as one of Africa’s busiest and bloodiest rivers between the 15th and 19th centuries. Following early Portuguese traders and a curious intercession by the largely forgotten Baltic Courlanders who arrived seeking gold, the river’s control toed-and-froed throughout the 17th century between the Dutch, French, and British, all hell-bent on sending untold thousands of Senegambians captured on raiding parties or bought from conniving regional kings, to the Americas. Beyond 1807’s act abolishing slavery, the British patrolled the river and spent four decades or so harassing illegal slave-ships until the trade ceased.

Thereafter, an olive-green slipstream whisks us back towards Banjul. As the river swells like a fattening anaconda, I watch a sunset during the Captain’s penultimate-night cocktail party that is piggy-pink like Harry the Mauritian barman’s cosmopolitans.

Harmony V - MARK STRATTON
Harmony V - MARK STRATTON

By morning, through my cabin window I see the silhouetted baobabs of the once notorious James Island, later rechristened in the cause of national pride as Kunta Kinteh Island. Kunta Kinte was a Mandinka slave given identity in American author Alex Haley’s international bestseller, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). Haley traced his ancestry back eight generations to Kinteh and The Gambia. Using the testimony of a Gambian oral historian (a griot) Haley claims his ancestor Kinte was abducted from a riverbank village called Juffureh and smuggled to James Island before being transported to Annapolis, Maryland, in 1767. Yet Haley’s work was subsequently labelled fiction, partly down to unreliable research. It’s unlikely Kunta Kinte existed. But whisper this quietly. He remains iconic to Gambians and day-tours to the island from the beach resorts are money-spinners.

Whether Kinte existed or not, there’s no denying the island’s nefarious past as a major transatlantic slave conduit. Just setting foot on this sun-burnished island, little more than the size of a football pitch, makes my skin tingle, the grasping heat thick with the lingering aura of doomed African souls.

With haematite-coloured stone walls – blood-soaked, if I’m being melodramatic – a French Company slave warehouse crumbles alongside a British battlement fringed by cannons, amputated of purpose. Assan, our guide, requests us to crowd claustrophobically inside what is interpreted as a punishment dungeon. “Imagine 20 of you chained here for weeks,” he asks. “They sat in their own excrement and were only allowed out weekly to be whipped and made to dance for exercise”.

The island, however, is eroding fast in scything currents. Assan fears it will be lost completely within the century if not bulwarked against the flow. All the former slave huts have gone, leaving only a few teetering fortifications.

“Soon guides will come here with tourists and say: ‘this is where Kunta Kinte’s island was’. It will be a disaster for The Gambia to dishonour the memory of our ancestors by losing it,” says Assan.

Or perhaps it’s the river’s own way of reinventing itself? Cleansing itself of human suffering and cruelty to continue its purposeful journey to the Atlantic, everlastingly wild, and for now, rarely travelled.

The Gambia Experience (01489 866939; gambia.co.uk) will relaunch its River of West Africa cruise for the 2021-22 season as part of its Unique Holidays collection for The Gambia and Senegal. This winter, those wanting to see The Gambia upriver can experience an eight-day Wildlife of The Gambia and Senegal package, featuring a property in Makasutu Forest, Fathala Wildlife Reserve, and the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project camp. The package costs £1,599 per person, including international flights, transfers, and a mixture of half and full-board accommodation. The FCDO currently advises against all but essential travel to The Gambia and Senegal.