Yusuf Bangura
Dec 31, 2025
I’ve been in Banjul since 26th November attending the wedding of the daughter of a close family friend in London. The three days of wedding events finished on the 29th.
Since I haven’t been to Banjul since 1994, my wife, Kadie (who was here in 2011 for another wedding), and I decided to explore the city and nearby towns for three extra days before flying to Freetown for a full holiday.
We hired a taxi for five hours on 30 December and toured Banjul city, Kachikally Crocodile Pool at Bakau, and parts of Kotu, which hosts a number of fabulous beach resorts. On 31 December, we will hire another taxi to take us to the university towns of Serekunda and Brikama, and spend New Year’s Eve at Kombo Beach Resort—arguably Gambia’s most adorable holiday resort.
*A festive wedding*
I’ll focus on the wedding in this piece and address the post-wedding tours in future articles.
We were treated to three days of unforgettable wedding experiences at the Kotu/Senegambia and Yundum districts—about 20 kilometers from Banjul.
The first event—the Meet & Greet party—was held on the 27th at Harmony Resort Boutique Hotel at Brufut, which is a short walk from the beach and situated on cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Since the couple and their parents live in London, my guess is that at least 80 percent of the roughly 170 guests were from the UK. There were also guests from the U.S., mainland Europe, Sierra Leone and Gambia. We were happy to see a few friends we hadn’t seen for many years.
The second event, the Bachelor’s Eve, took place at ‘’My Twin Tower’’ at Yundum district, close to the private residence of the current Gambian president. A distinguishing feature of this event were the live musical performances of two cultural groups: Orjeh and Jollay—traditional masquerade societies that are also popular in Freetown and adopted from the Yoruba in Nigeria by the Liberated Africans (the Krio) at the end of the transatlantic slave trade.
We were pleasantly surprised that the songs were all in Yoruba even though, like in Freetown, the singers didn’t understand the language. The leader of the Orjeh group informed me that his group celebrated its 100th anniversary this year.
The wedding itself—the third event—on the 29th, took place at Kombo Beach Resort. This is a large, elegant hotel with lush palm and coconut trees and well-manicured lawns, located literally on the sands of Kotu. It offers a breathtakingly full view of the Atlantic Ocean.
The resort was packed full with tourists escaping the European winter. The atmosphere was vibrant and inviting. There were giant pools and a water slide for families with children. Everybody seemed to be having great fun when we arrived. It’s a must-visit if you’re in Banjul even if you don’t stay there.
The wedding ceremony was held in a well-decorated makeshift tent right on the sand, with only a few metres from the ocean, providing an intimate and elegant atmosphere. And the reception was in a large hall. There was an endless supply of Western and West African food and drinks.
One fascinating feature of Sierra Leonean weddings is its asoebi (ashobi or kindred attire) culture, imported from the Yoruba by the Krio, many of whom have Yoruba ancestry. Three types of asoebi stood out: the stunning green floral lace worn by the bride’s godmothers; the purple floral lace of the bride’s family; and the colourful, nicely designed cotton dresses worn by the couple’s family members and close friends for the evening dance. We danced mostly to Sierra Leonean meringue and gumbay music as well as Nigerian afrobeats. It really was an incredibly joyous day.
*My links with the bride’s family*
The wedding was a union of the Gabbidon and Dura-Zainu-Deen families of Sierra Leone. We have deep and enduring ties with the bride’s family. I shared an appartment with the bride’s father, Abdul-Salam Zainu-Deen, when we were students in the UK in the 1970s. Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago.
He was a law student and I was pursuing a doctoral degree in international political economy when we decided to rent an appartment. We were so close that many people who didn’t know our family backgrounds thought we were brothers. We both had huge foreheads, so our friends often said that we looked alike. We prepared and ate breakfast and dinner together, shopped together, and organised and attended parties together. We also had the same network of female friends.
We had many memorable moments as close friends. However, one issue always stands out when I think of Salam: he won his first legal case as a student when he was studying for his bar exam.
Our landlord took us to court for refusing to pay our rent, which we deliberately withheld because of his refusal to repair our leaking bathtub. He asked the court to retrieve the rent from us and permission to get us out of the flat, which was at Clapton Common at Stanford Hill in London.
We had written several letters to the landlord asking him to repair the tub and opened a special account in my bank where we deposited the rent every month. We informed him that we would only release his rent after he had repaired the tub. This must have gone on for more than six months before he decided to take legal action against us.
We went to the court armed with the letters we had written to him and a bank statement detailing the monthly deposits of the rent.
I recall that when the judge called us to the podium, he was surprised that we didn’t hire a lawyer to defend us. Our landlord, on the other hand, had a lawyer. The judge warned us that it was a serious case and considered it a risk to defend ourselves without the services of a lawyer. We told him that Salam was training to become a lawyer and I was a doctoral student, and assured him that we were very capable of defending ourselves.
He then ruled that only one of us should speak. We agreed that Salam would speak and I would provide supporting evidence to back up his arguments. I had the files with me.
The judge was very impressed by Salam’s performance. Even though he chastised us for withholding the rent, he praised us for the systematic steps we took to inform the landlord about the bathtub’s leakage and protection of his rent in a special account in my bank.
He levied a financial cost on the landlord for the months that he refused to repair the bathtub and told us to deduct it from the rent. Salam told him that we had all the money we had deposited in the bank and were ready to pay the landlord in court what we owed him based on the ruling, which was only one month’s rent.
The judge also ordered the landlord to repair the tub and rejected his demand for us to vacate the appartment. It was a stunning victory. The landlord and his wife were shocked. They didn’t even understand the verdict because we heard them asking their lawyer whether we were still going to move out of the appartment. Their lawyer shook Salam’s hand and congratulated him on winning his first case even though he wasn’t yet a qualified lawyer.
When I left London in 1979 to teach at Dalhousie University in Canada and later in Nigeria, Salam and I remained very close friends. I got married before him.
He had two lovely daughters—Zakhira, the bride, and Zelda—with his beautiful and caring wife, Aisha, who is a great friend to my wife, Kadie. The family visited us often in Switzerland, and Aisha and the children have spent holidays with us in Freetown.
I also got to know Salam’s mother, Mama Zain-Deen, whom I visited at Savage Street in Freetown every time I was on holidays in Freetown before she passed away, as well as Salam’s deceased brother, Osman, and sister, Rakie. I also bonded well with Aisha’s Dura family—her father Chief Alimamy Dura, mother Mama Miniratu, and large number of sisters and brothers. One of my younger sisters is even married to a Dura.
It was a great pleasure to reunite with the Dura family in Banjul and to witness the happy union of their daughter, Zhakira, and Imanri.
Bangura lives in Geneva
