Toufah

Starred review from October 11, 2021
In this captivating debut, Jallow, a sexual assault victim advocate, shares her harrowing account of survival while parsing the nuance of the Gambia’s history, politics, and gender divide. She recounts growing up in the Gambia in a devout Muslim home where her mother was the second of her father’s three wives (“by... my mid-teens, we were fifteen people all together”). At 19, she entered a state-sponsored beauty pageant, but after she won, the scholarship she was promised never materialized; instead she was groomed and raped by the Gambia’s then-dictator Yahya Jammeh. Terrified that it would happen again, Jallow fled to Senegal and was eventually placed in a resettlement home in Toronto. In 2019, two years after Jammeh was voted out of office, the Gambia created a Truth Commission to contend with his horrific crimes. Incisive and controlled in her language, Jallow details the trauma and conviction that inspired her to come forward with her story at a press conference in her homeland (which, she writes, was the first time Jammeh had ever been publicly accused of rape in the country), sparking a watershed moment that led other West African women to break their long-held silences. This powerful story shouldn’t be missed.