The Plane at the BorderThe Gambia · 2016-2017“This is the one that ends at an airport, not a battlefield. It is rarer than you think. Come close.”Yahya Jammeh had been president of The Gambia since 1994, when he came to power in a coup at thirty-something years old and then kept winning elections in a country too small and too dependent on his government's goodwill for the word 'winning' to mean much. By 2016 he had ruled for twenty-two years, and the opposition was a coalition of seven parties so unlikely that Jammeh held a rally to mock them.The lesson the elders kept: Sometimes the force assembled at the door is the whole argument - the collective refusal of a region can succeed where a single country's protest cannot.