Sole Female Survivor In Senegalese Joola Shipwreck Recalls 2 Decades Old “Nightmare”

As today marks exactly twenty years since Joola, the Senegalese State-owned ferry capsized on the Gambian territorial water, victims and relatives of those who perished have to recall one of the most tragic water accidents in the world.

According to Pat Wiley, a journalist who has documented the incident in his book, more people died that day than on the Titanic.

It is believed that about 1,800 lives were lost in the tragic incident with just 64 survivors including a female.

The 356-capacity Joola had almost 2,000 people aboard.

In a BBC documentary, Mariama Diouf, the female survivor who was then four-month pregnant recalled, “When I got to the port, the ferry was full but I met a man who had left something home and needed to get it. He asked the ticket seller if he could exchange directly with me”.

Another victim, Aliou Cisse, who lost 11 members of his family in the disaster, recollected that as the ferry sailed, it started raining at a point in time and they were directed to move to the lower part of the deck.

“When we got below the deck, we began to worry about the number of people”, he said in the documentary and added, “People began to slide and the lights began to automatically go on and off”.

While stranded in the water, Mariama Diouf says, “I thought maybe it was God’s will that I die with my baby. Then suddenly I felt my head light up and then I knew I was going to come out of the water. One of them said ‘it’s a woman’ and another said ‘no a woman couldn’t hold on that long’ then I said I am a woman”.

She believes a lot more people would have survived if help had come earlier.

Pat Wiley who had investigated the tragedy for about a decade found that although the ship hit a storm that night, there were many contributing factors to it.

“The bolt was not properly ballasted. Many people got on board without tickets so you probably had over 2, 000 people on board. The majority of people had no life jacket”, he recounted in the documentary.

So far, Senegal has compensated victims and replaced the Joola, the BBC noted.

Source: opemsuo.com/Hajara Fuseini