Culture to become Gambia’s new tourists’ attraction

By Momodou Jarju

Attention has been drawn to culture as a new source of tourist attraction in The Gambia which would significantly boast the country’s economy.

Sheikh Omar Jallow, the director for creative and performing artsat the National Center for Arts and Culture (NCAC), said the country’s main source of tourists’ attraction used to be the sunshine, sea and sand.

But he said this would no longer be the case because tourists want a different taste, saying most of the tourists who come to the country are repeaters and they come back either for friendship or for cultural exhibition.

“Because knowing that they don’t need to leave Europe anymore to come down to Africa because they can simply fly down to Spain in Barcelona and get the most beautiful sun… like the Americans are doing in the Caribbean,” Jallow said Friday at a press briefing organized by NCAC.

Speaking further, Jallow said the tourism sector of the country is at a threat if sunshine, sea and sand continue to be the only sources of tourists’ attraction.

To deter or stop the threat, Jallow said they have started creating and developing new products which would help in sustaining the tourism sector, part of it is to develop cultural festivals. 

“We have started developing them (cultural festivals) and we have identified about eight (8) of them that we have incorporated base on the niche market that they have… in their communities to be able to enhance them and bring them on board so that they are part of the national calendar of events.”

In a similar development, The Gambia is heading the Network of Festival Managers in Africa (NFM) which Jallow himself is the chairperson.

Jallow said he had put the eight (8) cultural festivals together to form an association in which they would be link up to the new network created by the British Council.

The British Council conducted training in Nigeria bringing over 40 festivals around Africa to participate in a yearlong training program aimed at enhancing the capacities of the participants on how to create festivals that could attract European tourists’ especially British tourists to be able to come down to African festivals.

It also aims to create an avenue where African artistes participating in British festivals and vice versa.

“We were able to form the NFM group… during that congress; Gambia was nominated and eventually elected for the next three years to head the bureau which is base in Ghana at the Bambo Center in Adamstar State,” he said.

Cultural troops in The Gambia are said to be one of the benefactors of this latest development.

Sheikh Omar Jallow