An award winning Gambian journalist, Mustapha K Darboe, has published a book on former dictator Yahya Jammeh and his system of rule for the past 22 years.
A fiction title Playbook of a Tyrant is an e-book published on the biggest US-based online self-publishing retail site, Lulu.
“Rarely has one written a book to portray tyranny, a system established, sustained and ruined by the same fear that created it, as The Playbook of a Tyrant,” reviewer, Lamin Jahateh said.
With fictional scenes and characters, the book narrates how the disgruntled soldiers, led by a young man later to be known as Saikou Manneh, who staged a protest against the government were disarmed, detained but later set free.
This happens as the country’s president, Jakali Sanneh, was away.
Behind the country’s State House docked a military ship by Babylonia. Their mission was a joint military exercise with soldiers of Kanan (a fictional country representing Gambia), so they claimed.
Except that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, President Sanneh, was not aware of this military exercise.
The book is a narration of how one of post-independent Africa’s earliest multi-party democracies was thrown into a dictatorship and suspicious international powers that might have backed the coup.
Darboe, a correspondent for Turkey News Agency and senior reporter at The Voice newspaper, started journalism in 2014.
Two times national journalism awards winner, Darboe’s interest areas are mainly politics and public policy.
