By Nelson Manneh
The last time Fatima Khan saw her husband, he was packing a small travel bag. He told her he was heading to Dakar for business. She believed him. She had no reason not to—after all, they had been married for just a few weeks.
That was seven years ago. Since then, she has heard little from him. What she did not know at the time was that his trip to Dakar was a lie. Like many young Gambian men, he had taken the perilous “back way” journey to Europe, a migration route fraught with danger, where many die crossing the Sahara Desert or the Mediterranean Sea.
“I have spent more years waiting for him than I spent being his wife,” Fatima says now, sitting on the veranda of her in-laws’ house. “I am married, but I am not married. How do you call this a marriage when your husband is only a name, a memory?”
For many families, the back way journey has left behind unintended consequences, breaking homes and straining social relationships.
A Silent Epidemic
Fatima’s story is not unique. Across The Gambia, thousands of women are caught in a painful limbo—married but effectively abandoned, left to navigate life alone while their husbands chase uncertain futures abroad.
Some men do return, transformed by the fortunes of migration. But many, like Fatima’s husband, never do. They disappear into the margins of foreign cities, undocumented and unreachable. Some start new families. Others simply fade away, leaving their wives behind in a culture that rarely acknowledges their suffering.
Nenneh Baldeh, 27, knows that pain all too well. Her husband left The Gambia five years ago, promising to send for her once he was settled. Instead, he married a European woman.
“At first, he said it was just for papers,” she says, her voice tight with controlled anger. “He told me it was temporary, that I was his real wife. But it’s been three years, and he has forgotten about me.”
She had to give birth alone. She had to raise a child without the man who had promised to be by her side. “We used to talk every day. Then he stopped answering my calls. Then he told me he needed space. Now, he’s a stranger.”
