Maryann Gabbidon

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Maryann Gabbidon ( 1870 - November 1938 ) was a Gambian entrepreneur.

Life

Maryann Gabbidon was born as the daughter of Charles Benjamin, who transported and traded peanuts on the Gambia River to Bathurst (now Banjul ) on several ships .

At a time when very few Gambian girls attended schools, she attended St. Mary's School in Bathurst and the Annie Walsh Memorial School in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where she was among the top performers in her class.

After initially selling food in the Albert Market in Bathurst (now Banjul ) in the 1890s, she imported kola nuts from Portuguese Guinea and Sierra Leone from 1911 and gradually opened shops in Bintang , Kuntaur and Fatoto .

While she, like other Gambian women, were denied political rights, at the beginning of the 20th century many women were involved in commercial transactions in consumer goods, in which they competed with European companies. Even though women dominated the fruit and vegetable trade in Bathurst from the 1920s onwards, only a few women succeeded in earning a relative wealth, among them Maryann Gabbidon.

The profits of her trade enabled her to send her children to Sierra Leone and Great Britain for education from the late 1920s. As the customs status of kola nuts in Senegal changed in the 1930s, affecting trade, she expanded her business to include cotton and linen products.

Gabbidon is said to have been particularly valued by both her customers and her competitors. Her successful career is cited as an example of the fact that, despite adverse conditions, individual women managed to become economically successful, to advance socially and to contribute to decolonization efforts through the good education of their children .

family

She married Samuel Horton Jones , who was appointed a member of the Gambian Legislative Council in 1906 and 1911 . She had four children, including the medic and politician Samuel Horton Jones (also often SHO Jones ), who became speaker of the Gambian parliament . Her son Edwin studied accounting in the UK and was an accountant in the Public Works Department in the 1930s .

literature

  • Hassoum Ceesay: Patriots: profiles of eminent Gambians . 2015, ISBN 978-0-9574073-6-7 , pp. 55-62 (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Perfect: Historical Dictionary of The Gambia . Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4422-6526-4 ( google.de [accessed July 8, 2019]).
  2. ↑ THE LONDON GAZETTE, MAY 25, 1906. (PDF) Retrieved July 8, 2019 .
  3. ↑ THE LONDON GAZETTE, 12 MAY, 1911.3639. (PDF) Retrieved July 8, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Gabbidon, Maryann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Gambian entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH 1870
DATE OF DEATH November 1938