ABSTRACT

Once word spread around Niumi about what had happened across the river on July 22, 1994—that a group of junior officers of The Gambia's army had ousted the only president the country had ever elected and was handling government business by caveat of a military council—people were cautiously hopeful. Across Niumi during the time of the Second Republic, globalization was behind a rush to new technology. For centuries people living in that small region along the Gambia River have been changing as a result of their relationships to a widening world. If the newest wave of globalization results in keeping Niumi dependent on impersonal market forces, its residents incapable of competing with people and institutions in the wealthier nations, then one would have to conclude that, in spite of what leaders of the grand international economic agencies contend, globalization is not yet doing much for Niumi's poor, which is just about everyone living there.