Jakarlo with BackWay: youth, old traditions, new trends, and clandestine migration within The Gambia

Committed to rendering the realities of some of The Gambia's youth's lived experience, the paper explores how an art critique during the Visual Voices workshop served as a platform that enabled young people to draw upon visual methodologies to reflect upon and share some of the major concerns and challenges that The Gambia's youth population are forced to confront in one way or another. Drawing on the artworks of participants from the ArtFarm (AF), an artists’ and farmers’ collective, photographs taken during a ‘Jakarlo’, [Jakarlo is the Wolof word for face-to-face or confrontation] a youth wrestling event in Kerr Sering, a Gambian village, and discussions about migration as a new phenomenon with young people from the Abuko Youth Association [See https://www.facebook.com/abukoyouthassociation/] (AYA), the paper explores the ways in which young people are engaging in traditions of visual and performing arts, wrestling, and migration in new ways. The discussions reveal the significance of their practice and engagement as youth leaders and active citizens in The Gambia. Simultaneously, we witness the power of visual narrative as a means of enabling an exploration into the themes that emerged from discussion and observation. These themes lead us to ask how The Gambia's young people have come to negotiate the social phenomena of wrestling, migration, and art as ‘new trends' rooted in ‘old’ practices, how tradition is held onto, and how have they taken on new forms within the youth landscape of The Gambia.