SUMMARY
NRC (National Revolutionary Council), was an armed group in the Gambia that carried out an unsuccessful coup attempt against the Gambian government in late July 1981. The NRC had a Marxist-Leninist ideology and their intention was to establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the country.
NRC was led by the leftist politician Dominic (alias Kukoi Samba) Sanyang. Born in 1953 and, he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Gambian parliament in the 1970’s. His radicalization process is believed to have started in a militant youth organization, and these political views were thought to have deepened through travels to the Soviet Union and Libya after his failed political attempts. After returning to the Gambia in mid-1980, Sanyang joined the Gambia Socialist Revolutionary Party. With the support of some of the party’s members and disaffected officers and troops from the Gambian Field Force, a paramilitary police unit, Kukoi Samba Sanyang formed the 12-men National Revolutionary Council (NRC) in early 1981, chaired by himself. The council led the NRC and later initiated the coup attempt, where several hundred of Field Force troops quickly joined the group. A relatively large number of taxi drivers also joined the group, something that has led to the coup sometimes being called ‘the taxi driver coup’. Sanyang and many of the men in the NRC came from the Jola ethnic group, which was one of the smaller and more marginalized ethnic groups in the Gambia. There are no official records as to the number of troops in NRC, but estimates vary from around 300 to over 1000.
At the time of the coup attempt, there were allegations of NRC having support from foreign governments, most notably Libya and Muammar Gaddafi due to Sanyang’s previous travels and possible connections with the Libyan leader. However, none of these allegations have been corroborated.
Several members of the NRC managed to flee abroad after the coup attempt failed. Kukoi Samba Sanyang first fled to Guinea-Bissau, from where he was later deported to Cuba. After this, he spent some time in Libya as well as in Burkina Faso, where he supported Charles Taylor’s armed insurgency in Liberia and was known under the alias of Dr. Manneh. Several hundred of the NRC members and supporters were detained after the failed coup attempt and a number of them were sentenced to death; these judgments were later changed to lifetime in prison.
