Toufah Jallow lives in two worlds that are about to collide. In the North Toronto neighbourhood she has come to call home, she is an anonymous college student, “a simple girl,” she said, “trying to go to school and take the TTC.” But in The Gambia, the small West African nation she used to call home, “simple” is a distant memory. There she is a well-known activist and former beauty pageant winner who accused a dictator of rape. She is not simply a face of the nation’s “Me Too” movement.
Today Jallow is cast into the spotlight again, and not just because of the TRRC report recommending the dictator be brought to justice for his alleged crimes in an international tribunal. She is also in the spotlight because her two realities will meet. This month Jallow’s self-titled book “Toufah” launches in Canada, bridging the gap between the nation she fled and the one that is now home. With its publication, some of her neighbours and friends will learn her story for the first time.
Nor is it erased from the life story presented in her book. In a work that is equal parts memoir and thriller, the 25-year-old activist, named Fatou but known to friends and family as Toufah, recounts her coming of age in a massive Muslim family full of love and contradiction. “By the time I was in my mid-teens, we were fifteen people all together,” Jallow writes, referring to her father, his three wives — her own mother included — and her many siblings.
In 2014, Jallow, then an aspiring actress and student at Gambia College, entered and won a state-sponsored beauty pageant. She was promised a scholarship to attend university abroad. Instead, Jammeh pursued her relentlessly. He sent his female cousin Jimbee to shower Jallow with gifts lavish and practical, according to the book: gold necklaces, furniture, running water in her home.
There, thanks to a Gambian friend in Canada, she connected with a few benevolent people in high places. And after several sleepless nights and a long anxious flight, she found herself safe in Toronto. “There is no word for rape in the Fula language,” Jallow writes. “This isn’t because it doesn’t happen. It’s because we’re supposed to believe it is so rare that no word is necessary for it.” Today, when Jallow talks about rape in her language, she said that she is faced with two diametrically opposed options: to speak in euphemisms or in stark detail.
Jallow’s public revelations in 2019 “brought a revolution of other young people to come out and say they were abused,” said Colley. Women, Colley among them, marched against sexual violence in the streets. At Jallow’s suggestion, survivors posted their own stories of abuse alongside the hashtag “I am Toufah.”
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